India, the largest country in the world with an estimated 1.4 billion inhabitants, began counting its population on Thursday in a long-overdue census that had been postponed for years, partly because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the first round of the year-long experiment, officials have begun conducting surveys in five states and three federal territories nationwide. However, what is required to count over a billion people? This is how India is doing it.
The Logistics
Throughout the nation's 36 states and federal territories, including almost 640,000 communities, more than 3 million officials—mostly school teachers—will personally visit every home, knock on every door, and count every single individual.The physical door-to-door surveys will be conducted in two stages. While the second will concentrate on residents and their social and economic characteristics, the first will include homes and housing conditions.
The exercise will take a year to complete and is anticipated to cost $1.3 billion.
Originally scheduled for completion in 2021, the once-every ten-year demographic census will end in March of next year.
Self-Counting
Prior to the actual poll, residents in each region will have a brief opportunity to register online through a 16-language government portal.
In order for enumerators to verify the information during their visit and add it to the original database, citizens can enter the required information on the site.Tools for Digitals
Another first is that India will use a mobile app in addition to the self-enumeration option for this census. Additionally, a web-based portal is available for process management and monitoring.
In order to ensure that no one is overlooked and the survey is accurate, New Delhi has also implemented an application to map the country's households by segmenting them into small geographic areas with a restricted number of residences.
Since the digital database is anticipated to speed up processing, many census datasets will be made public as soon as possible.
Count of Castes
In its second phase, the census will also gather information about castes. For the first time in 80 years, India registered its castes in 2011, however due to doubts about the data's veracity, it was not completely made public.Indian politics and daily life are heavily influenced by the inflexible social stratification system that has existed for thousands of years.
Numerous governmental institutions are required to provide affirmative action quotas to the so-called lower castes for employment and college spots, and there are numerous caste-based political parties.