While Suman Musadkar slowly walked through the narrow dirt alleys in the neighborhood of Mumbai, the most overcrowded city in India, threw approximate guesses.
“The population is about 6000 people in this field,” the social worker told CBC News before its voice behind. She was trying to think about the number of children living in this section of Govandi, one of the poorest suburbs in Mumbai.
Musadkar is not aware of certainty, because India has not stated since 2011, although the country is supposed to complete a survey that follows population growth and demographic change every 10 years.
Before 2011, a national census was held once a decade ago since 1872.
“When we get the data, we realize how important it is,” said Musadkar.
“If we have the census data, we can access [people] Musadkar, 46, said in their homes.
“We can provide them with the services they need.”
Within 14 years since Indian officials held another number, the country has witnessed rapid growth, as China has exceeded as a more populated nation in the world, with 1.44 billion people, according to United Nations estimates.
A large country, like India, relies heavily on the sample of investigative studies for data collection, which is essential to paying government financing, creating economic numbers, numbers of inflation and job estimates.
“The quality of the samples is getting worse and worse than removing you from [last] “The census, because the population grows and moves people,” said Brunab Sen, an economist and former statistical head in India.
“There is a huge gap in information,” he told CBC News.
“It’s worrying”
The collection of national survey data was postponed in 2021 at the beginning due to the Covid-19s.
Sen called this “completely concept”, but he suffers to understand the reason, after four years, the process did not start. Especially since the collection of data in all regions in India requires a huge effort, including visits to more than 600,000 villages.
“It’s worrying,” Sen said. “Things are likely to leak through cracks at the present time,” because the 2011 census data is unreliable.
Sen led the Statistics Statistics Committee for the Statistics until recently, before it was quietly dissolved. He told CBC News that he and his colleagues in the committee raised the absence of updated census data at each meeting, and she wondering about the delay in conducting a new survey.
Last September, Amit Shah, Minister of Internal Affairs of India, stated that his government will start conducting the census “very soon”, but it has not been updated since then.
The main opposition Congress has repeatedly pressured the Narindra Modi government about the absence of census data. Sonia Gandhi, the leader of the great Congress, Sonia Gandhi, appeared again during Parliament’s discussions on the budget bill.
She claimed that 140 million Indians were deprived of their rights to obtain aid and free pills under the National Food Security Law because the population data on which the government depends is a distant matter.
Classy Tentation requests
Congress also requested that the national poll include “class census”, which would shed light on the number of lower sects, as determined by the strict Hindu hierarchy system, occupying power sites or gathering wealth.
It is a very political request. Social inequality is extreme in India and has only deepened since the epidemic, with the five richest of the Indians carry 60 percent of the country’s wealth, according to Oxfam International.
For decades, India had a positive work program to treat discrimination in the layer and help those part of the marginalized layers to move forward. But the need was based only on estimates.
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India had not had a class census since 1931, when it was still under British rule, and the results of the class that were collected during the last census were not launched in 2011.
There was speculation in newspaper editing articles that the current census delays were “tactical” One piece of opinion This indicates that the Moody government was hoping to “get rid of the population volume in the other backward layers”, which is the official term in India for disadvantaged societies or lower classes.
Another argument Delay is a clear political option, stating that “if the census is a priority,” [the Modi government] He would have come out immediately after the epidemic managed its path in 2021. ”
A couple of academics in public policy in Boston, Writing in the science journal LancetShe concluded the delay in the census “raises doubts” and transferred “the last style of the Indian government of ignoring or rejecting unpleasant data provided by international surveys and classifications.
Huge mission
What makes matters more complicated is that the epidemic led to a tremendous migration in India – people return to their villages from the largest cities where they were working.
“We do not know where they went,” said Sen. “They have spread throughout the country and we cannot communicate with them” because the census registration data is very old.
The census – or the census will have to be known locally – bridge the information gap. But the logistics of data collection is one of the most sophisticated areas in the world, given the size of India and the number of its population.
“We have to train 2.5 million people from the census,” Sen said. “The finding of these 2.5 million people becomes a problem, because they should be government employees” borrowed from their usual duties at the state levels and the local government.
Civil service employees will need to loan the census for 18 months or so to track people and collect data.
“This is a big issue,” Sen told local governments.
While economists, academics and others have repeatedly raised concerns about the absence of a census and what had an impact on India, Sen said that there was no significant response from officials within the government.
Sen said: “Every ministry, especially those that work in the field of providing public luxury functions … Shouting and screaming” must be about the absence of updated statistics.
“I don’t hear that.”