India Counts Its Heads:
SABAVALA, SHAROKH
India Counts Its Heads Carefully planned nationwide census also studies socio-economic conditions By Sharokh Sabavala Bombay This week, 750,000 specially trained Indians will complete...
...These relate to religion, sex, marital status, birthplace, education, profession and mother tongue...
...In cities like Delhi and Calcutta, with its teeming refugees, the situation is even worse...
...The census takers are putting 13 basic questions to India's 80 million families...
...It is hoped, therefore, that the results of the census will convince him that unless he agrees to change his ways India faces the very real possibility of a human explosion...
...But the backbone of India is its 750,000 villages, which are slow to adopt new ideas and even slower to accept the fact their way of life needs change...
...Yet the Indian villager, once he accepts a new idea, does so with astonishing single-mindedness...
...Operation Census will not only give India a true idea of its own complexity...
...Actually, work toward this goal began last summer when census takers climbed to 18,000 feet in the Himalayas and pushed deep into the inaccessible jungles of the Naga Hills close to the BurmaChina border to collect information...
...No housing is provided for them and they are quite content to live in tin and rag shanties at the work site...
...They have been fighting the taboos of caste, creed, color, religion and superstition...
...Nor is the average man here any longer willing to accept as his kismet (destiny) suffering, starvation and death...
...But the census takers are not merely counting heads...
...Forecasters say it will be 430 million...
...Through a carefully prepared questionnaire, they are probing into the socio-economic background of a vast multiplicity of races that are at varying stages of development and have widely different social, religious and cultural backgrounds...
...Similarly, there are 250,000 construction workers here who move from zone to zone as they finish one job and start another...
...For the first time, also, information will be sought on housing and household conditions, the degree of urban congestion, existing types of workshops and their products, and migration, particularly from rural areas...
...By the end of March, the Chief Census Commissioner hopes to announce a provisional all-India population figure...
...In the last 10 years, hundreds of thousands of dedicated Indians have been trying to get the peasants to grow more food, use more water and better seed and fertilizer, live away from the cattle and build new homes...
...Indeed, it has encouraged officials to attempt a socio-economic study of 500 selected villages...
...For the first time, no citizen will be asked for his caste or sub-caste, or if he belongs to a "backward class" (usually Hindu untouchables) or "backward tribe...
...it was 360 million in 1951...
...It has helped, too, in efforts to count the "homeless" There are, for instance, 750,000 people in Bombay alone whose only home is the pavement...
...When the final figures are in, they are likely to show that more than 430 million beads were counted...
...And, quite apart from mushrooming family planning centers and clinics, the average Indian in cities like Bombay is going out of his way to study this problem and overcome it...
...A two-year program of publicity and preparation for the current nation-wide count, however, has done much to aid the census takers in their task...
...India Counts Its Heads Carefully planned nationwide census also studies socio-economic conditions By Sharokh Sabavala Bombay This week, 750,000 specially trained Indians will complete a project launched February 10 that promises to be the world's largest census...
...The ancient safety valves of famine and pestilence no longer operate as freely as they did in the bad old days...
...The steps taken to alert these citizens to the poll, and the setting aside of three nights for counting them, have proven most effective...
...Even when they win, the victory is rarely clear-cut...
...it will confirm what the Government has been telling the Indian people for years: that however hard they work for progress and however hard the world tries to help them, they cannot achieve selfsufficiency as long as the national birth-rate remains at its present high level...
...They had to cope with the taboos of orthodoxy, the inborn reluctance of the peasant to give away anything, even information, the constant shifts in population and the huge influx of refugees from Pakistan since the last census in 1951...
...By the end of this month, census takers are expected to have visited every home, palace, jail, school, artisan workshop, factory and warehouse in India...
...Most of them have jobs and the means to pay for shelter, but there simply is not enough shelter available...
...After a second check of the tabulations, the socio-economic data will be collected and published— probably not before 1963...
...Their work, quite apart from physical hardship, was enormously difficult...
...This truth already is uncomfortably obvious to the urban dweller...
Vol. 44 • February 1961 • No. 9
