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The new enumeration exercise has begun with a house survey which counts, for the first time, television sets, cars and other such indicators of affluence

By Sumit Mitra

How many Indian households have toilets? Well, do you need to know that? Do you want to be told how many homes are using cowdung as fuel to bake their chapatis and how many are using LPG? Or what proportion of Indians are living under thatched roofs and what is the share of those who have ceilings made of the proper reinforced concrete?

These "houselisting data" are a regular ingredient of every decennial population census in India since 1961, and they surely give a few snapshots of the quality of life prevailing at the turn of each decade. But Census 2001 has gone several steps ahead in trying to gauge to what extent India has been modernising itself. It is a lot more than counting toilets and thatched roofs. The house numbering and houselisting operation, which is now on, has put two million enumerators on the march across cities, towns, villages, and even in the snowy reaches of the Himalayas and the last inhabited dots in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. They carry to households a questionnaire with 34 separate entries. The houselisting operation of the 1991 census had 23 questions.

However, the houselist schedule this time round is different in character from its predecessors. The new questions cast a searching look at the interiors of households, spotting lifestyle indicators as well as privacy and individual space. "We are trying to create a socio-economic benchmark to measure India's progress, say, 50 years from now," says Census Commissioner of India Jayant Kumar Banthia.

Some of the new elements in the current questionnaire are:

• Radio/transistor: Previous houselist schedules did not have an entry for measuring the spread of this popular communication medium.
• Telephone: The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has a database of telephone connections but it cannot segregate residential connections from commercial or government lines. A count of homes with telephones will enable Census 2001 to separate individual connections from those in institutional and non-residential homes.
• Television: With over 75 million TV sets in the country, the houselisting count will define its spread in each sector. This information may be of great value to television software producers and to the advertising industry.
• Bicycle: The bicycle census is expected to be the first reality check on ownership of the cheapest form of individual transport.
• Scooter/moped/motorcycle: Though the spread of motorised two-wheelers is at least a two-decade-old development, mapping its dispersal is being attempted for the first time. The data will also test how much truth is there in the general belief that most of today's motorists are yesterday's two-wheeler riders.
• Car/jeep/van: The highest mark of achievement in India's social convection, its inclusion in the coming census will show its spread not only across the states but in cities and even in select urban localities. It is also a vital information base for future urban planners.
• Availing banking services: The probe will give a theoretical underpinning to many assumptions that have propelled public policy so far on the social necessity for an extensive banking network. Indira Gandhi nationalised banks on the assumption that it would bring to the poor the much-needed capital, but she had no scientific data to check if the assumption was correct.

Alongside the survey of household assets, the houselisting operation adds new depth even to traditional questions about availability of normal facilities. In 1991, the issue of drinking water availability was left at whether the water source was within the premises or outside. Now it probes how far you have to go to fetch water if the tap is not in your house. Half a kilometre gets a "very far" marking in villages, but for cities, even 100 m will get the same marking.

The houselist notes the source of lighting, which is a new concept. There is an entry for "no lighting" too, which, Banthia explains, should cover a swathe of tribal homes. Besides, lighting being the first use of electricity in households, its spread will give an accurate measure of electrified homes. The statistics on electrified villages churned out by the governments fail to capture the home-use pattern.

Yet another improvement on the 1991 model is the entry for the number of married couples in the household having independent rooms for sleeping. This privacy component is obviously influenced by the US census, which is now on and which has a similar entry for "crowding" within the census building. Following the US model, the Indian census has introduced a query related to waste water disposal -- whether it is connected to a closed drain, an open drain or no drain at all. In 1991, it was only asked if the household had a toilet. Now the issue is probed deeper. Is it a "service latrine", "water closet" or a "pit latrine"? Whether the household has a bathroom now becomes a question in itself. In 1991, a bathroom was still seen as a luxury and excluded from the questions.

Well-known demographer K. Srinivasan, who heads Population Foundation of India, an NGO for funding family welfare projects, says that the additions to the houselist issues this time will "draw the baseline for India's modernisation". The earlier houselist issues drew benchmarks for basic human amenities, but not of comfortable, modern living -- with radio and television, and drinking water taps within easy reach.

However, the previous census figures show India's pitiable performance even in distributing basic amenities. In 1991, only 16.1 per cent of the 151 million households had all the three amenities of drinking water, toilet and electricity under one roof. In rural India, this figure was an appalling 3.9 per cent. Whether these figures will look up substantially in 2001 is anybody's guess, but this year's count of luxuries may well expose the thinness of India's veneer of modernity. As a demographer with the Census Commissioner's office says, "Maybe you'll find the reach of television in rural India much lower than what is expected." Besides, the dispersal of household wealth will redefine settled concepts regarding which districts or tehsils are "backward" and which are not. Such refining of the concept became necessary since state governments started offering incentives on a competitive scale for investment in enterprises located in "backward" areas.

The house-numbering exercise that is going on with houselisting will enable the census authorities, at the time of the population census in March next year, to discard the traditional method of entering an individual slip for every head counted. From this census on there will be a single slip for the household. That makes the operation less dependent on paper-work. The household profiles come with an array of living-standard details by which future generations of Indians will know how tough life had been for their ancestors.

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