New Delhi: The Additional Registrar General of India (RGI) has informed the states on December 30, reports The Hindu, that the competent authority has decided to further extend the date of freezing of administrative boundaries up to June 30, 2024. “This rules out the Census exercise before the 2024 general election, which is expected to be held in April and May next year. This is the ninth such extension of the deadline,” writes the newspaper.
The extension of this deadline to freeze the administrative boundaries of districts, tehsils, towns and municipal bodies impacts the already delayed census, as it “usually takes about three months after the boundaries are set to identify and train the enumerators”.
This has implications on a variety of programmes and estimations that the government and others make over needs of the population, as the Census is the largest public body of data about the country available and updated. It may even render those seen as needing extra care under the National Food Security Act among the uncounted and therefore not helped by government schemes. The women’s reservation Bill passed in the special session of parliament is contingent on the next delimitation, which depends on the next census.
“The latest decision of the Addl. Registrar General of India regarding the freezing of administrative boundaries until October 2024 is perplexing as no reasons have been publicised for the same. We, the citizenry are completely in the dark about the plans for conducting the long overdue decennial census. 2023 was a largely Covid infection free year but census data collection exercise was not initiated. In the absence of up-to-date data, how will the State and Central governments plan developmental programmes and poverty eradication schemes is a billion dollar question. The non-disclosure of certain annual reports needs to be seen in light of the trend that has emerged over recent years of stalling the publication of crucial demographic and economic statistics giving some technical excuse or the other,” transparency rights activist Venkatesh Nayak told The Wire.
Apart from the Census, the office of the RGI and the Census Commissioner of India have also not released two important reports on the registration of births, deaths, and causes of deaths for the years 2021, 2022 and 2023.
The Hindu writes that the report on ‘Vital Statistics of India Based On The Civil Registration System’ for 2020 was only released in May 2022. “These vital statistics are invaluable for planning, monitoring and evaluating various programmes related to primary health care, family planning, maternal and child health, education etc,” it cites the report as saying.
The annual ‘Report On Medical Certification Of Cause of Death’ was last released for the year 2020. This report carries statistics on the causes of deaths, cross-tabulating them by age and sex of the deceased. There has been a wide divergence, almost ten-fold, between India’s reported figures on COVID-19 and that estimated globally by the WHO. The official document would bring more clarity on this but it remains unreleased.