Mapping India: The world's largest count
The Documentary Podcast
India is undertaking its largest-ever digital census, a massive technological and administrative effort to count over 1.4 billion people. The
Key takeaways
- India has added approximately 200 million people to its population since the 2011 census.
- Caste enumeration is returning to the census for the first time in nearly 100 years, presenting a major sociological challenge.
Main topics
- Digital Census Implementation
- Caste Enumeration Controversy
Notable quotes
The idea that caste and modernity could coexist was a very uncomfortable idea.
Conclusion
The census is much more than a headcount; it is a powerful tool that s
Transcript preview
Speaker 1 (0:00) This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Have you found yourself confessing personal things to ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude? You're not alone. Something huge is underway that we haven't really found the words for yet. A new voice in our ear, guiding what we think and feel and do. But should we trust it? I just thought, what has this thing done to him? Black Box, The Chatbots, a new podcast series from The Guardian Investigates. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 1 (0:36) Is it okay for Gen Z job applicants to take iced coffee into an interview? That's the question burning up social media following a viral TikTok video from an American recruiter. I'm William Lee Adams. Join me on What in the World to hear all about this intergenerational conflict in the workplace. What in the World is an award-winning podcast from the BBC World Service. We explain what's going on in the world every weekday in less than 15 minutes. Find us wherever you get your BBC podcasts. Speaker 1 (1:09) The Documentary, home of the best documentaries from the BBC World Service. Speaker 8 (1:17) I am Rishbhanu Barua in India, where the country is in the middle of the world's biggest census. It's a count that reaches every corner of the country, from the floodplains and tea gardens here in Assam, to the crowded lanes of Kolkata and the high-rise towers of Mumbai. Speaker 6 (1:33) The scale is staggering. And since the last census was conducted in 2011, India has added about 200 million people to its population. It doesn't Speaker 8 (1:45) just record how many people live here. It captures religion, languages, housing conditions, education, work and migration. Speaker 5 (1:53) All censuses are important and this one is particularly important. The current one is also important because it may be, it can be used for reallocation of electoral seats in India. And Speaker 8 (2:08) for the first time in nearly 100 years, caste is back on the agenda. It's probably the most complicated thing. that the census will count. There are more questions on the census than ever before, as India tries to understand itself and all its diversity. This is the documentary, Mapping India, the world's largest count, from the BBC World Service. Speaker 8 (2:37) India has launched the largest population count the world has ever attempted, and it's the first to be conducted digitally. More than 1.4 billion people, over 3 million field staff, and self-enumeration in 16 languages. The whole operation monitored in near real time, making it one of the most ambitious civic exercises on the planet. But for all the technology and scale, This is a national ritual that's been part of India's administrative tradition for more than 140 years. Demographer Dr. Sonalde Desai is from the National Council of Applied Economic Research in New Delhi. Early encounters with the census helped shape the work she does today. Speaker 5 (3:18) I grew up in a very small town in Gujarat. And in those days, they would come on your door and they would actually write up numbers. Because the areas in India don't always have house numbers. Even the streets are not very well labeled. So they would write with a chalk on your door a number so that they would know that this house has been already counted. You know, I don't remember a lot of it as a kid. But later on, now look, I'm a demographer and I use census data all the time. So I'm very interested in how it gets collected. So I remember at one point. census interviewer came to our house and I was sure that I'm only going to answer as many questions as they ask. I don't want to give any information in advance. And they are supposed to try and figure out how many families are living in the household and then interview each family. But we also had a household help and her family who lived in a couple of rooms nearby. And the enumerator is asking us everything. And I kept thinking, OK, are we going to get to this household help or not? And turned out that they were so good. Then not only did they get information about our family, he very carefully asked us about the helper and then went to their household to get the information. The quality of data collection done by some of the census enumerators in India is just outstanding. Speaker 8 (4:50) And those experiences also gave Sonalde Desai a sense of how people across India view the census. Many see taking part as a basic civic duty. Speaker 5 (5:00) People are pretty used to the idea of census. They do want to cooperate in as much as they can. To Speaker 8 (5:07) understand how India's census became the vast operation it is today, we need to look at where it began. Speaker 8 (5:17) Historian Tripura Damansingh says the original census was born out of crisis. Speaker 2 (5:22) Censuses were very much an outcome of the 1857 uprising. What happened was that the East India Company was disbanded and the... crown took over the government of India. And they were faced with an underlying problem that was at its crux quite basic. The uprising had exposed the quite dangerous lack of knowledge about this vast territory that the crown had just become the ruler of. If further discontent were to be avoided, then they really needed to understand their subject population a lot better. And then, of course, if you wanted to improve government, you needed better estimates and statistics. for your revenue administration, for your fiscal needs, for sanitation and public health, which are increasingly becoming a thing. And so, India quickly became the template for the British to Speaker 8 (6:15) work from when gathering data. Here's Indian sociologist and caste expert, Professor Satish Deshpande. Speaker 7 (6:21) Indian statisticians were at the forefront of the development of the technology of a sample survey, something that is taken for granted today. On the other hand, the British colonialism perfected most of its techniques of governance, including the technique of the census, because India was its largest laboratory and the most complex place among the British colonies. In the early period, that is to say in the 19th and the early 20th century, there was also a major anthropological site. The need to know and understand this huge country that they were governing with actually a very, very small, relatively speaking, a very small set of administrators. So in many ways, the technology of the modern census, India is the birthplace of that technology. And India is a very critical place in the history of that technology. So the first proper decennial every 10 years census started in 1881. And some of the colonial administrators got quite enthusiastic about this. So, for example, the first professors of anthropology in Cambridge and Oxford universities were former census commissioners. India's statisticians really were Speaker 8 (7:37) leading the world. Techniques developed here were exported to other parts of the empire. But the original British census model hid difficulties. India's sheer diversity making it almost impossible to apply. There Speaker 2 (7:49) were large pastoral nomadic populations with kind of no settled abode. There were no pre-existing registration systems like there had been in Britain. Britain had birth registers, parish registers, etc., against which the new kind of surveys could be checked. India had none of that. And then there were dozens upon dozens of languages and dialects. Often you had completely illiterate or semi-literate intermediaries and subjects. So they had to really address all of these problems. Plus they had to, and this is the controversial bit, introduce categories that they were never really used in Britain. Religion, but a kind of, not an open-ended category of religion, but, you know, fixed category. So you had to choose whether you were Hindu or Muslim, but also caste. And this was a pretty big undertaking, both in terms of... administratively, but also normatively, because it was more than just bean counting. It made the Indian census a kind of almost an ethnographic exercise. So by the late 19th Speaker 8 (8:57) century, the Indian census is fully established, counted every 10 years from 1881 until 1931. There is a census in 1941, but a stripped-down wartime exercise without caste. Then comes a decade of upheaval, war, famine. Partition, independence, and the new Indian government has to decide whether caste should ever be surveyed again. Speaker 7 (9:24) The idea that caste and modernity could coexist was a very uncomfortable idea. Understandably, the early Indian leadership thought that caste should be delivered. Unlike religion, unlike many other things, which are essential to our identity as Indians. And this was given the circumstances at that time. In retrospect, this appears naive. But at that time, it was very, very understandable. response to caste. So if you want to abolish it, then it was felt that counting it would be counterproductive. And that's true as well, that counting caste would give it fresh life. Plus, there was this association with the British colonial divide and rule policy. So the new Indian government said, we will not count caste. Speaker 8 (10:15) So after independence from Great Britain, India drops caste from the 1951 census altogether. It means those questions have not actually been recorded in an Indian census for 95 years. Decisions today are still being made on data that is almost a century old. Surveying caste now is an enormous undertaking. But what actually is caste? Speaker 7 (10:37) Think of it as a form of identity. Unlike race or gender, it is difficult to detect caste visually, as one might say racial difference. or gender difference most of the time. The simplest way to think of it is as a sort of tree. where the identity part of caste is the trunk of the tree, the economic part of caste are the roots, and its branches are political. Caste is an institution that regulates both identity in its double-edged sense, that is to say, it promotes feelings of we-ness and belonging on the one hand, and other-ness and othering on the other hand. And it is largely not a matter of choice at all. It is given by birth. So it's a kind of a complex form of identity, but it also regulates life chances in India today. People in other parts of the world often confuse caste with class. In India, caste and class are very, very closely intertwined together. It's very hard to separate them. Let me put it this way. While caste may not determine your class, the meaning of your class position is greatly inflected by the caste position that you occupy. So being an upper class person is all very well. But if you are a lower caste person who happens to be in the upper classes, you're going to be a minority. And if you're going to be an upper caste person in an upper class position, you're going to be surrounded by people like yourselves in your class. But what your class means for you, whether you're upper class, lower class, or middle class, is shaped by your caste position. And in fact, some of us in academics have suggested various ways of thinking of them together, making it difficult to think of them separately. So, neologisms like classed, for example. have been experimented with in India. And caste is always evolving. We have to think of caste as a sort of semi-benign, semi-toxic virus that, you know, that inhabits the human body as a normal situation. It's not a disease. It's a norm. And that's as our bodies adapt to the world, it also adapts to the world. So in that sense, it's changing all the time, but it's there. all the time.