Stand up and be counted

Published : 18 March 2011, 02:10 PM
Updated : 18 March 2011, 02:10 PM

Every now and then our front door bell rings and there stands a stout little gentleman carrying a huge bag, smiling a small smile. He takes his shoes off, comes in and sits down at our dining table, unfurling a huge roll of papers almost larger than he is. Taking a sip of the water I serve him, he coughs gently and then uncaps his pen. He looks up, smiles, and begins his task for the moment, asking us the most intimate of questions, ranging from how old we are to what we do and how many air-conditioners we have in the house.

None of us take any offence at the personal nature of his examination, since we know that he is merely doing his job, and a rather arduous and painstaking job, at that. He is a data collector for one of the most ambitious tasks that India has been set: to get every single individual recorded, labelled, registered and all that good stuff.

This will be valuable not only from the point of view of doing a general census, or a count of all this country's citizens, but also help to implement what is known as the Unique Identification scheme, whereby every Indian has a special identity card that lists all their personal details, making it easy for everything from the collection of government pension to finding someone in a criminal database. It will act as a combination social security card, a voter identity card, a ration card perhaps, and a general means of identification, eliminating all the various papers that are so necessary in the process of applying for a passport, a gas connection, a visa, and much more. Whether this scheme will work or not remains to be seen, since it is rather ambitious and dependent on an organised system of data collection and analysis, as well as an efficient and systematic manner of presenting that collected date and issuing the unique identity card at the end of the whole lengthy, tedious and bug-ridden procedure.

I read recently that in Bangladesh the 5th population and household census kicked off earlier this week. As always, as in India too, the most prominent citizen of the country, its leader, the President – Mohammad Zillur Rahman in the case of Bangladesh and Pratibha Patil for India – was the first to stand up to be counted, as the saying goes, thereby hopefully setting the example for the rest of us to cooperate with the people and the process that they are trying to work on. The five-day-long process will result in data about the total number of people in the sub-continental nation, especially on their age, sex, ethnicity, religion and social and economic status, which will be useful in planning and implementing schemes for development and progress.

As in India, Bangladesh also has a 'floating population', as it is called, which finds a home, however temporary, wherever possible, be it in a bus depot, train station, on the pavement, or under a bridge. These people, too, will be counted, though it will be a fairly difficult task.

The problems involved with an exercise of this magnitude are not few. Even as teachers, municipal workers and various others, primarily volunteers, are added to the task force, the word needs to spread from the government that this kind of process is going to be implemented and must be completed within a certain viable timeframe. Of course, organising the whole thing and getting it in the right gear at the right time is in itself a huge job. But worse still is the problem of getting the citizens, for whose eventual benefit it will all be done, to cooperate.

In India, there have been reports of people not being polite to the data collectors – that is perhaps the least of the issues that need to be addressed. For most, it is a matter of genuinely not having the time to sit down and have responses recorded – in Mumbai, or other big cities, where families tend to be nuclear and both adults go out to work, the coordination between those who have the information and those who need the information is perhaps the most difficult step in the entire process. There have been stories written of where people are home but refuse to open the door, refuse to give the information being asked for or just refuse to entertain the data collectors once they know why the doorbell has been rung by a stranger.

Once all the information is gathered, it needs to be sifted, analysed, channelled, used, to best effect. Census taking is not a spy story being acted out; it is a useful – valuable, in fact – exercise through which the people who live in and belong to a particular country can be helped by those with the power and authority to do so.

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Ramya Sarma is a Mumbai-based writer-editor.