Lack of planning is evident. Picture for representational purposeIt is called the socio economic and caste census. If so why was data about one-third of the country’s population who live in cities not released? The name itself should not have been misleading. The data was not collected by the census commissioner, who is authorised to do so as per the Census Act. The data has not been collected as per the rules in the Census Act. It will give a bad name even to the national census.
Let me say it in the beginning that this is only a BPL (below poverty line) survey. It is given a bigger name by adding a question about caste. At the press conference in which the data was released, Union minister Arun Jaitley claimed that it was the first time that data on caste was collected in the country after the 1931 census. If so why that data is not made public. Why is that the minister’s statement does not mention the present state or about releasing the data later?
There is a misunderstanding that caste-based data is not released because of opposition from political parties. However, like the government admitted in Parliament, the reality is that all political parties unanimously demanded that caste-based data should be collected in the 2011 census.
When it was noticed that a Rs 4,000 crore project was planned to collect caste data, even before data collection started in 2011, I had warned that it would fail and the money spent would be a waste. I had also suggested a practical alternative to collect data in a time-bound manner and present it efficiently.
The claim that it is the first data collection with the help of computers and not using paper is also wrong. Computer distribution had failed totally. In many places, including my home and the homes of many readers, data was collected on paper.
I had said that the role of many agencies such as the ministry of rural development, the ministry of urban development and the ministry of social justice and empowerment would pose hurdles to its time-bound and efficient implementation. That has happened. Chief minister Oommen Chandy says that the rural data released now is totally wrong. It is a correct assessment. No politics should be seen in it. Though the survey data has been released by the NDA government, the project was conceived by the UPA government, led by the Congress. It was Sonia Gandhi who ceremoniously inaugurated the project in a far-flung village in the north-east. If anyone tries to justify the data of this survey, it is stupidity.
(The writer is the former census commissioner and registrar general of India and the former chief secretary of Kerala)
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