Policymaking just guesswork thanks to delay of census

Survey that determines everything from number of poor to population size unlikely ahead of poll

India has held a census every 10 years since 1881, deploying an army of interviewers who fan out across the country, quizzing people about every aspect of their lives from housing and education to family size and income.

But when Covid-19 struck in 2020, the government delayed the survey, noted globally for its statistical rigour. Now all that seems certain is the headcount will not be held before the 2024 general election, which is making it tough to determine everything from India’s population size to its number of poor.

“The census is critical. You need basic data about the country for planning and, like any projection exercise, the greater the period over which you’re projecting, the less accurate the projection becomes,” said Pronab Sen, former chairman of the National Statistical Commission.

Taking figures from the last census, which was carried out in 2011, the United Nations forecast India’s population of 1.4 billion would overtake China’s by the middle of this year. But the Indian government has given no calculation of its own.

There has also been no official poverty update, leading to at least five estimates of the number of poor based on various figures and methodologies, according to data website IndiaSpend. Those estimates range from 2.5 per cent of the population – 34 million – to 29.5 per cent, or 373 million. In the 2011 census, 269 million people were listed as poor, 21.9 per cent.

Economists are employing “high-frequency data” such as car sales, company earnings, electricity output and steel and cement production as proxies for the census to try to gauge the health of the economy and consumption patterns.

But these numbers are insufficient for government planners to see economic and social trends and frame policy, analysts say.

For instance, planners need to know how well India is doing in terms of improving its male-female sex ratio, with boys long favoured over girls, boosting literacy rates and analysing how fast economic growth is changing the lives of ordinary Indians.

“We don’t know what’s happening to the ordinary person, to the average Joe,” said Harish Damodaran, a visiting fellow at the Centre for Research and Policy Analysis in New Delhi. “Without up-to-date data, policymaking becomes guesswork.”

The census supplies granular-level information, allowing government agencies, health planners, demographers and other professionals to drill down into the most minute details of Indians’ lives.

“The Netherlands have done away with their census because it’s a small country and every bit of information about the population is registered,” Sen said. “In India, a lot of that information isn’t recorded so there’s simply no replacement for the census.”

The census delay is significant because India’s economy has suffered a series of jolts in recent years. There was demonetisation in 2016, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government voided most of India’s currency to flush out untaxed wealth, the 2017 introduction of a complex goods and services (GST) tax that had teething problems, and the pandemic.

Covid-19 sent the economy into a tailspin, pushed millions into poverty and triggered the largest internal migration since the British split the subcontinent into India and Pakistan in 1947. Countless city workers walked home to their villages when the pandemic left them jobless.

“Things will have changed on the ground but without the census we don’t know how much they have changed,” Damodaran said.