Mapping India: The world's largest count

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1:37The Documentary, home of the best documentaries from the BBC World Service. I am Rishbhanu Bharuwa 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 stars of Mumbai. 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 just record how many people live here. It captures religion, languages, housing conditions, education, work and migration.

2:23All 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 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 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.

3:06India 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.

3:48I 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 on 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.

4:34I 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 our 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 senses and numerators in India is just outstanding.

5:19And those experiences also gave Sonal 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. 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.

5:46Historian Tripura Daman Singh says, the original census was born out of crisis. 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 were increasingly becoming a thing.

6:40And so, India quickly became the template for the British to work from when gathering data. Here's Indian sociologist and caste expert, Professor Satish Deshpande. 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 side, 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.

7:33So 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 leading the world. Techniques developed here were exported to other parts of the empire. But the original British census model hit difficulties.

8:15India's sheer diversity making it almost impossible to apply. There 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.

8:59Religion, 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 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.

9:53The idea that caste and modernity could coexist was a very uncomfortable idea. understandably the early Indian leadership thought that caste should be done away with. 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 a 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.

10:41So, the new Indian government said, we will not count caste. 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? 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.

11:38Caste 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 otherness 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 that caste position that you occupy.

12:34So 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 CLAST, for example, have been experimented with in India.

13:19And caste is always evolving. We have to think of caste as a sort of semi-benign, semi-toxic virus 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. The problem is that it's not visible in the same way. And the languages that are available to us at a specific historical moment to speak about caste keep changing and these languages constrain us and enable us in different ways. So 95 years since it was last counted, the census teams will once again be asking about caste.

14:11With more than 3 ,000 castes and many more subcastes, it's one of the most complex questions enumerators will attempt to measure. Asking somebody their caste in India is itself a social event. So I respond to that according to what sort of social event I think it is. I'm thinking, who is this person who's asking me? What is his status relative to mine? How am I supposed to answer? Am I supposed to answer from above as somebody who's graciously answering a question that an underling is asking? Or am I below this person who has authority or who has, you know,

15:01After nearly a century without up-to-date caste data, India is trying to understand how its social landscape has changed. Sociologist Sunil De Desai says the picture is far from straightforward. Historically, what the caste data was collected was on the five big categories. that sort of allowed people to put themselves into categories that are most disadvantaged and who are eligible for affirmative action benefits. Now the idea is that let's try and collect caste information for everyone so that what we can do is we can determine what proportion of population falls into this, either the lowest caste or the middle caste, so that the reservation for them in jobs, in politics, etc.

15:47can be realistic. The problem is that the counting of these castes is very difficult, largely because there are so many names. You know, it's the same thing for our occupations. You could be a clerk in a government. You could be a clerk in a small shop. And those are very different kind of positions. Similarly, the castes can be sort of taken very broadly or very narrowly. What is really needed in India is to get an accurate count of various castes so that we can evaluate A, who is deserving or who has been left behind and hence is deserving of some sort of affirmative action. And B, which is even more politically sensitive, is which caste has actually done well now and maybe doesn't need to be receiving some of the affirmative action benefits.

16:4095 years on, how do people feel about being asked the caste question again? I've been catching up with a group of friends in Guwahati. Hello, I'm Anindam Goswami from Assam, Guwahati. Hello, I'm Konkana. I'm working as a banker in Assam. Hello, I'm Barsha. I'm a research scholar and based in Guwahati. What does caste mean in your everyday life? Do you know your caste? I know my caste. when a census person comes over are you comfortable sharing it? Yes I am. For me caste in everyday society is something which is irrelevant for me. Sometimes I would like to conceal my surname because as you know in India people associate your caste with your surname.

17:26So I don't want anybody to know me for my caste but for who I am. What people notice first about you when you say your name is your surname and then your caste. Oh, you belong to that. You belong to this. And then they kind of relate to you in that sense. If you're from their community, the conversation would be different. You know what I mean. Also in our marriages, occupation, everywhere caste is, you know, somewhere ingrained in a manner you don't want it to be. If I would have that option, I would omit my surname and I'd just say caste is irrelevant. Because coming from a specific caste also, we can say that it is irrelevant, which is true.

18:05But then if we talk about a person who belongs to the so-called lower caste, I think caste in that person's everyday life really matters. And he can never shy away or he can never escape that thing. Which I, coming from a very different caste, can really get away from that thing. For me it is irrelevant, but for others it is very, very different than how it is for me. I have been treated differently because of my caste. I have seen people talking to me in a different manner and bringing up caste to just sometimes kind of patronize me also, which is a negative thing. But coming from a place of privilege, I cannot say that it does not affect others the way it affects me.

18:47But I think it is ingrained in our minds. And from decades and generations, we have been operating in a certain society where caste has always mattered. Actually, it's a big elephant in the whole society, not in the room. Where people know it exists, they kind of, you know, slightly ignore it and let it be. We see two different things here. Exactly polar opposite, I guess. So there is one thing that is the privilege that my friend just talked about. Also, there is a kind of reverse bias, you know. We don't enjoy both. As millennials and Gen Z people, we do not enjoy the privileges as well. We don't want, we don't demand the privileges.

19:24of the rules we also don't want to reverse bias that sometimes we see but we cannot be complaining about reverse bias because there are other people who are facing worse situations than us when you have official data in a census based on caste like for example there are certain ghetto areas right only based on cause where they're uh you know marked as communities who are backward okay that will again you know kind of create something in a society we can't imagine about people would not want to go there private companies might not want to invest because they know they will not have that kind of a profit.

19:55So my point is there when you point it out that data should be secure. With me as a child of an intercaste marriage and especially where my mother is a Brahmin and my father belong to an OVC community. So now when the census arrives at my house and they ask for my caste, I don't really know what caste do I actually apply for. Like, we understand the caste is patrilineal, which by that logic, I should actually opt for my father's caste. But I've never really grown up with him. And I've never really interacted or had any sort of sense of belonging with the community. And since my upbringing has been with my mother and my mother's family the kind of lived experience is of a brahmin lived experience although i would not fall under the brahmin category so it becomes very confusing scenario for me and i was actually checking up uh online if i could refuse to answer the question about caste what i've recently gathered is that you could just say you're indian i'm wanting to believe the census makes good effect on the society regarding upliftment and all.

21:20But I just cannot divorce the religion and the caste. It's very difficult because religion is in us. We are not in religion. Somehow it is living in us. I really want to believe we can try and move outside this a little bit. But it will take time. Sociologist and professor Amitabh Kundu has been looking at the issue of caste for over 40 years. Now what happens? the moment you mention your caste, you try to give your other responses, which is caste compliant. You know, your food habits, whether your wife is working outside or not. You know, there are many castes in India where women would not go out.

22:02So your responses may be caste compliant rather than describing the actual situation. And actually, India has attempted to count caste in recent years. Gilles Venier is a New Delhi-based political scientist. The census in 2011 did not include caste enumeration, but there was a separate exercise called the socioeconomic and caste census, which was conducted by a different ministry. Some of the data was released in 2015, but all the caste information was withheld. And the official explanation at the time provided by the government was that there were data quality problems, there were errors, inconsistencies, duplicate entries, and just the sheer complexity of reconciling thousands and thousands of reported caste names into a coherent taxonomy.

22:55So different states sometimes grant different status to similar cast. Some castes have different names in different places. The spelling is haywire, so it's an extraordinary complex exercise. Something like 2 million castes were recorded because everybody recorded, sometimes some people record their own profession, some people recorded their surname and their linguistic variations. There are different states. So same caste may be spelled differently. So it made absolutely no sense. So this time, what they are trying to do is to standardize. Don't give the option to write down what caste you belong to.

23:32But they are giving the standard options for each state. Out of this, how many? So that they become comparable. remain a few thousands. So that is the challenge. Can we generate the caste data appropriately by giving some kind of a standard option? But the Indian government is confident it can collect accurate data this time around. Ministers recognize the sensitivities around caste and argue that collecting the information is essential to give policymakers a clearer picture of inequality. I'm Rajvano Barua and you're listening to the documentary Mapping India, the world's largest count from the BBC World Service.

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27:25I'm Brijhwanu Burwa and this is the documentary Mapping India, the world's largest count from the BBC World Service. This is not just the biggest census in the world. It also has more questions than ever before, up from 29 to 40. Everyone must legally take part in the census and the government has spent a lot of time and money trying to raise awareness of the current. So are people getting to grips with it. I'm on the streets of Guwahati, the gateway to the northeast of India, finding out.

28:08I'm Jotirma Sharma, and I'm here from Royal Avaaz, Guwahati. So when the census team comes to your door, what's the first thing you expect from them? they'll be asking some personal questions like like the numbers of people in my family my father mother the what whatever the stuff that we all do so this instance includes questions about caste okay how do you feel about being asked about that like i won't say it's unnecessary but as you know like i come from a you know brahmin family but i do not have that kind of thinking If a person who is below caste than me, I do not care much. I think of him of the same level as me.

28:50I don't say, hey, you cannot come and do some stuff like that. So I'm pretty cool with that. I do not think it's pretty sensitive, but I don't think it's unnecessary because the majority of the people think it's necessary. So I'm not going to question that.