The deadline to freeze the administrative boundaries of districts, tehsils, towns, and municipal bodies, among others, has been extended till June 30, 2024, a senior government official told The Hindu. This means that the decennial Census exercise, initially scheduled to be begin in 2020, will now be postponed till at least October 2024 as it usually takes about three months after the boundaries are set to identify and train the enumerators.
This also delays the implementation of the law reserving 33% seats for women legislators in Parliament and the State Assemblies, as that is also dependent on the completion of the Census.
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The Additional Registrar General of India (RGI) informed the States on December 30 that the competent authority has decided to further extend the date of freezing of administrative boundaries up to June 30, 2024, thereby ruling 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.
Women’s reservation delayed
According to the 128th Constitutional Amendment Act, 2023, also known as the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam, the one-third reservation of seats for women in the Lok Sabha and State Assemblies shall come into effect after an exercise of delimitation is undertaken based on the relevant figures of the first Census recorded after the Act has commenced. The Act received Presidential assent on September 29.
On September 20, Union Home Minister Amit Shah told the Lok Sabha that the Census and the delimitation of seats exercise would be conducted after the general election, but did not specify the year when it would take place.
COVID caused initial delays
India has conducted the Census every 10 years since 1881. The first phase of this decade’s Census was expected to begin on April 1, 2020, but had to be postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In the absence of fresh data, government agencies are still formulating policies and allocating subsidies based on the data accrued from the 2011 Census.
After initially attributing the pandemic for the postponement of the exercise, the last three notifications, including the one issued on Saturday by the RGI, have not specified any reason for the continuing delay.
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The 31 questions for the first phase, the Houselisting and Housing Schedule, were notified on January 9, 2020. As many as 28 questions have also been finalised for the second phase, the Population Enumeration, but are yet to be notified.
Recent birth, death reports not released
Apart from the Census, the office of the RGI and the Census Commissioner of India have also not released two key reports on the registration of births, deaths, and causes of deaths for the years 2021, 2022, and 2023.
The report on ‘Vital Statistics of India Based On The Civil Registration System’ for 2020 was only released in May 2022. The preface of the report said that civil registration was a continuous, permanent, compulsory recording of the occurrence and characteristics of vital events, like births, deaths, and still births. “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,” the report stated.
Similarly, 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. During 2020, on the recommendation of the Indian Council of Medical Research, new codes were introduced to account for deaths due to COVID-19.
