INDIA TODAY begins one of the world’s largest census exercises to enumerate its estimated 1.2 billion population in a single database.
The headcount, which federal interior minister P Chidambaram described as the “biggest operation since humankind came into existence” will be India’s 15th census since 1872 and would cost the government 22.09 billion rupees (€368 million).
Nowhere before in the world has a government tried to count, identify and issue identity cards to more than a billion people, Mr Chidambaram added.
President Pratibha Patil would be the first Indian to be listed followed by her deputy, vice president Hamid Ansari.
In sheer logistical terms, the census is a gargantuan task spread across 35 provinces and federally administered territories, covering 640 administrative districts, 7,742 towns and over 600,000 villages.
It would take 2.54 million enumerators nearly a year to collate the data and much longer to tabulate and formulate it.
Federal home secretary GK Pillai said in New Delhi the enumerators would visit over 240 million households and 12,000 metric tonnes of paper would be utilised to print 640 million census forms and five million instruction manuals for their reference.
Census forms would also be printed in 16 languages and the instruction manuals in 18.
Mr Pillai said the census would be undertaken in two phases and eventually create a database of demography, economic activity, literacy and education, housing and household amenities, urbanisation, fertility and mortality.
It would also detail India’s multifarious tribes, languages spoken and religions followed, data gathering that would involve extended visits to every household.
Census 2011 would also mark a milestone as the government intends, for the first time, to create the National Population Register, a comprehensive identity database for each citizen. This would facilitate creation of a biometrics-based identity system of photographs and fingerprints, with identity cards for all Indians above 15.
Mr Pillai said the government would give a unique number to each resident, also a global first for such a vast population. “Though photographs and fingerprints will be taken, no decision has been taken on an iris scan,” he said.
The first of the two-phased census tabulation, the “house-listing and housing census”, will be conducted between April and July.
The second phase, the “population enumeration”, will be conducted from February 9th-28th, 2011.