When Suman Musadkar slowly passed through the narrow dirt of Aleja District in Bumbai, the most populated city of India, she threw a difficult supposition.
“The population is about 6,000 people in this field,” she told the social worker CBC News before her voice took up. She tried to think about how many children live in this part of Govandi, one of the poorest suburbs of Bombay.
Musadkar does not know for sure, because India has not been conducting a universal census since 2011, despite the fact that the country is to perform a survey tracking population growth and demographic changes every 10 years.
Before 2011, the national census was held once every decade from 1872.
“When we receive data, we realize how important it is,” said Musadkar, because the census contains small details, such as “this house has a pregnant woman, whether the house has a breastfeeding mother … or a child who is, which is A child who is a child who is a malnourished child. ”
“If we have a census, we can reach (people) in their homes,” said 46 -year -old Musadkar, who has been helping the inhabitants of Slums for 18 years.
“We can offer them the necessary services.”
According to estimates from the United Nations in 14 years, since Indian officials conducted a census, the country recorded a rapid growth, ahead of China as the most populated nation, from 1.44 billion people.
A large country, such as India, is largely based on sample surveys to develop data, which is crucial for increasing government financing and establishing economic data, the number of inflation and labor estimates.
“The quality of the samples becomes worse and worse that you are further removed from the (last) universal census, because the population is growing and people move,” said Pronab Sen, an economist and former main statistics of India.
“There is a huge information gap,” said CBC News.
“It's disturbing”
The meeting of national surveys in 2021 was initially delayed due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Sleep called it “completely understandable”, but he tries to understand why four years later the trial still did not start. Especially since the data gathering in all region regions, it requires huge effort, including visits to over 600,000 villages.
“It's disturbing,” said Sen. “Things probably fall because of cracks” because the data of the common census of 2011 is unbelievable.
Until recently, the dream managed the permanent committee of the India government until recently before he was silently resolved. CBC News said that he and his colleagues from the committee recalled the lack of updated census data at each meeting, questioning delays in conducting a new survey.
In September in September, the Interior Minister Amit Shah stated that his government would start to run the population “very quickly”, but from that time there was no update.
The main opposition congress party has repeatedly pressed the government of Narendra Modi on the lack of a universal census. The senior leader of the Sonia Gandhi Congress raised this issue again on Monday, during the parliamentary debates on the budget account.
She claimed that 140 million Indians were deprived of their rights to receive help and free grain in accordance with the National Food Safety Law, because the data of the population on which the government is based is so out of date.
Requests for “Kastowy List of Universal”
Congress also asked for a national study for a “caste list”, which would shed light on how many lower castes, in accordance with a fixed rigid Hindu social hierarchy system, takes power or gathered wealth.
This is a highly political request. According to Oxfam International, social inequality is extreme in India and has only deepened since the pandemic, with the richest five percent of Indians with 60 percent of the wealth of the country.
For decades, India had an affirmative action program to solve caste discrimination and help those who are part of marginalized castes to achieve the front. But the need was based solely on estimates.
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India did not have a caste census since 1931, when it was still under the British rule, and the arrangements specific to the caste collected during the last universal census in 2011 were never issued.
In the editorial article in the newspapers, speculation has appeared that the current inventory delays are “tactical” One opinion Suggesting that the Modi government hoped that “he would get out after calculating the size of the population of other backward classes”, an official date in India for the community in an adverse situation or lower castes.
Different was arguing The delay is a clearly political choice, stating that “if the census were a priority (Modi government), he would get it immediately after Pandemia ran in 2021.”
Several scientists from public policy based in Boston, Writing in the scientific journal The LancetHe ended the delay in the list “raises suspicions” and condemned “recently the Indian government of ignoring or rejecting unpleasant data provided by international surveys and rankings.”
Gigantic task
Complication of matters is more that Pandemia led to huge migration in India – people returning to their villages from larger cities where they worked.
“We don't know where they went,” said Sen. “They are distributed throughout the country and we cannot contact them” because the registration data of the universal list is so old.
Changes in the universal list – or the universal list, as are known locally – will have to close the information gap. But the logistics of data collection is one of the most complex in the world, taking into account the size and population of India.
“We need to train 2.5 million universal lists,” said Sen. “Finding these 2.5 million people becomes problematic because they must be public officials” they borrowed from their regular duties at state and local levels.
Civil service officials would have to be delegated to the Universal List surgery for about 18 months to take persons and develop data.
“This is a huge problem,” said a dream for local governments.
While economists, scientists and others repeatedly gave concerns about the lack of a census and what influence on India, the dream said that officials in the government little reaction.
“Every ministry, especially those that deal with the social welfare functions … He should scream and shout “about the lack of updated statistics, said Sen.
“I can't even hear it.”