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VIEWPOINT: KAUTILYA
Counting Us In Census
By Jairam Ramesh
Two million enumerators are out there collecting data on over a billion
people
The world's largest
enumeration exercise will go on till February 28, with about two million
field workers criss-crossing the country to figure out the basic economic
and social characteristics of over a billion people. By the end of the
year, the results will be public. This is modern India's 14th census which
is held every 10 years, the first dating way back to 1871. Successive
censuses, particularly those before Independence, have played a key role
in, to use the words of the great American anthropologist Bernard Cohn,
classifying and making objective to the Indians themselves their culture
and society.
Regrettably, the census has got mired in controversy
even as it has started. Some Christian organisations, for example, have
objected to Scheduled Castes (SCs) being
categorised only as Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist SCs. These organisations
quite obviously are not aware of our Constitution. One leading national
newspaper blared in its front page that this would be free India's first
caste-based census. This is not a caste-based census. Attempts were made
to make it one but the idea was dropped. Like in all censuses since 1951,
the only caste data that will get collected relates to SCs and Scheduled
Tribes (STs). The last census which collected, analysed and published
detailed caste data was in 1931. And about the President's sub-caste,
on which editorials castigating the Census Commissioner, who is an IAS
officer soon to get a doctorate in demography from the London School of
Economics, were written, the simple point is that there is no national
list of SCs and STs. There are only state-specific lists. And less than
3 per cent of the people are enumerated outside their state by place of
birth or place of residence. Thus, the census will, in fact, cover 97
per cent of the population, an impressive achievement.
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Jayanto
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Controversy over caste and the census is not
new. The doyen of Indian anthropologists G.S. Ghurye wrote way back in
1932 in his classic Caste and Race in India that the caste-spirit has
been livened up in India by the treatment given to caste in each successive
census. M.N. Srinivas, India's greatest sociologist, in his Social Change
in Modern India published in 1966, described how census operations stimulated
a widespread desire for caste mobility right from the first census itself.
Further, a number of castes claimed different status in different censuses.
The census operations of 1901 under the leadership of H.H. Risley popularised
caste sabhas. Cohn points out that it is no coincidence that most of the
basic treatises of the Indian caste system were written by men who had
served as census commissioners-the more famous of them, apart from Risley,
being E.A.H. Blunt, J.H. Hutton, Denzil Ibbetson and L.S.S. O'Malley.
Censuses had far-reaching impact also on religion.
Kenneth Jones in his noted book Arya Dharm, which came out in 1976, has
shown how Hindu consciousness and Hindu politics was shaped in the early
1900s by data thrown up by censuses. Lala Lajpat Rai himself acknowledged
that orthodox Hinduism became sensitive to the issue of untouchability
largely due to fears generated by the census data on the religious status
of Indians.
By contrast, independent India's censuses have
been staid but solid affairs. However, the 1951 census did get off with
a big bang. The then census commissioner R.A. Gopalaswami, an ICS officer,
wrote in his report of "improvident maternity" as a "form
of antisocial self-indulgence" that if not controlled would destroy
India. Gopalaswami defined improvident maternity as the child birth occurring
to a mother who has already given birth to three or more children, of
whom at least one was alive. Incidentally, its incidence is still around
45 per cent. His passionate language, combining superb English and precise
mathematics pointing to the need to control population growth vigorously,
was an anathema to Delhi's rulers who believed that population was a resource
and not a problem. He was denied promotion at the Centre. But India's
loss was Tamil Nadu's gain because Gopalaswami was to combine with K.
Kamaraj to lay the foundations of a successful family planning programme
which was continued with remarkable results by later chief ministers and
administrators like T.V. Antony.
Risley bequeathed to us the Anthropological
Survey of India. This organisation mounted a massive exercise between
1985 and 1992 called the People of India Project. The project identified
4,635 communities/castes that inhabit our country out of which 16 per
cent were SCs, 14 per cent were STs and 23 per cent were OBCs. Forty-three
volumes of this project were to be published of which, alas, only 29 are
out. It is the most exhaustive study of who we claim we are. The truly
remarkable conclusion, as noted by K.S. Singh under whose leadership the
study was done, is that every one of us in India is an immigrant.
(The author is with the Congress party.
These are his personal views.)
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