Mapping India: The world's largest count
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What is the scope and significance of India’s new digital census?
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I am Bridge Ghana 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.
The scale is staggering. And since the last census was conducted in twenty eleven, India has added about two hundred million people to its population. It doesn't just record how many
people live here. It captures religion, languages, housing conditions, education, work and migration.
All censuses are important and this one is particularly important. The current one is also important because it maybe it can be used uh for reallocation of electoral seats in India.
And for the first time in nearly hundred years, cast is back on the agenda. It's probably the most complicated thing. That these census will count. There are more questions in this 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. India has launched the largest population count the world has ever attempted, and it's the first to be conducted digitally. More than one point four billion people, over three million field staff, and self enumeration in sixteen languages are 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 one hundred and forty years. Demographer Dr. Sonal De Sai is from the National Council of Applied Economic Research in New Delhi. Early encounters with the census helped shape the work she does today.
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 uh uh areas in India don't always have house numbers, even the streets are not very well labelled. So they would write with a chalk on your door uh 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 on the time. So I'm very interested in how it gets collected. So I remember at one point census uh 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 egg 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, okay, are they 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.
And those experiences also gave Sunal De Desai a sense of how people across India view the census. Many see taking part as a basic civic duty.
People are pretty used to the idea of census. Uh they i they do want to cooperate in as much as they can.
To understand how India's census became the vast operation it is today, we need to look at where it began. Historian Tripuradamant Singh says the original census was born out of crisis.
Census was were very much an outcome of the eighteen fifty-seven uprising.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the scope and significance of India’s new digital census?
0:00–7:06
2
How is the census being conducted digitally across 16 languages and millions of households?
7:06–13:34
3
Why is caste being recorded again after 95 years and what challenges does it pose?
13:34–18:51
4
How are language and mother‑tongue classifications handled in the census?
18:51–24:58
5
What gaps exist in counting women’s work and disability data?
24:58–30:39
6
How is internal migration tracked and why does it matter for policy?
30:39–37:08
7
What do experts predict about India’s future population trends and urbanisation?
37:08–43:25
8
How will the census data shape India’s social and economic planning going forward?
43:25–50:49