New Delhi, Feb 23 (PTI) A group of former bureaucrats on Monday said care must be taken to ensure that the 2027 Census fully records the population of various minority groups in the country, covering religion, caste and tribe.
In an open letter to Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India Mritunjay Kumar Narayan, the group of 90 former civil servants said the issue of religion is, and has been in the past, a sensitive area for the Census.
The signatories, all members of a Constitutional Conduct Group formed by them, include former chief of Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) A S Dulat, former chief information commissioner Wajahat Habibullah, ex-lieutenant governor of Delhi Najeeb Jung, former election commissioner Ashok Lavasa, ex-Union home secretary G K Pillai, former foreign secretary K Raghunath and former Punjab Police chief Julio Ribeiro.
The group, they said, has no political affiliation and is “committed to the promotion of the foundational values of our Republic and the observance of norms of Constitutional conduct”.
“At a time when political leaders openly express their opposition to the inclusion of so-called ‘Bangladeshi Muslims’ in the electoral rolls, care must be taken to ensure that the Census fully records the population of various minority groups in the country, covering religion, caste and tribe,” the former bureaucrats said.
They said the reasons for delaying the decennial Census exercise, which has been carried out in independent India from 1951 to 2011, by six years have not been made public.
“This lack of transparency gives rise to unnecessary apprehensions in the public mind that the Census is being conducted at this juncture to enable the completion of the exercise of delimitation of constituencies in 2027-28, in time for the 2029 Lok Sabha elections.
“We would certainly hope that no such extraneous considerations have influenced the timing of the 2027 Census,” the former civil servants said.
They said they “fail to comprehend why the Census could not have been carried out by 2023, as was done in 143 other countries”.
The former bureaucrats said that past experience, especially in the 2001 and 2011 Censuses, has shown that mere technological advancement in computing facilities does not necessarily speed up the release of data.
“There is a need to be open to the possibilities of errors, with effective measures being put in place to ensure data quality,” the letter said.
Dropping questions on data items that are not required, cannot be collected or where alternate sources of data are available would help in streamlining the data collection process, reducing respondent fatigue and resulting in better quality data, it said.
For example, the questions on children born/surviving are better collected in the National Family Health Surveys, the letter said.
“Other Backward Classes (OBC) have not been specifically classified in the Census. The methodology for caste enumeration is yet to be announced. While one option could be to compile a list of castes for people to select from (as was done in the Bihar caste survey), we feel the better option is to leave the field open in the Census form, as was done in the 2011 Socio Economic and Caste Census (SECC),” it said.
The data on tribes was being collected in past Censuses only from the Scheduled Tribe (ST) population, the letter said.
If all tribes, other than those in the ST list, are classified and recorded, a long-existing injustice to the Denotified Tribe communities, which account for more than 100 million people, would be rectified, it said.
“As former civil servants, many of us have been, during our careers, involved in the Census exercises at district, state and national levels. We are sure that you will exercise the highest level of professional competence in ensuring that the upcoming Census meets the threefold goals of accuracy, transparency and accessibility,” the letter read. PTI AKV DIV DIV
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