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2011 census of India

15th Indian census

  • 8 min read
  • 7 chapters

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Spread across 28 states and 8 union territories, the census covered 640 districts, 5,924 sub-districts, 7,935 towns and more than 600,000 villages. A total of 2.7 million officials visited households in 7,935 towns and 600,000 villages, classifying the population according to gender, religion, education and occupation. The cost of the exercise was approximately ₹2,200 crore (US$230 million) – this comes to less than US$0.50 per person, well below the estimated world average of US$4.60 per person.

Information on castes was included in the census following demands from several ruling coalition leaders including Lalu Prasad Yadav, and Mulayam Singh Yadav supported by opposition parties Bharatiya Janata Party, Shiromani Akali Dal, Shiv Sena and All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam. Information on caste was last collected during the British Raj in 1931. During the early census, people often exaggerated their caste status to garner social status and it is expected that people downgrade it now in the expectation of gaining government benefits. Earlier, there was speculation that there would be a caste-based census conducted in 2011, the first time in 80 years (last was in 1931), to find the exact population of the "Other Backward Classes" (OBCs) in India. This was later accepted and the Socio Economic and Caste Census 2011 was conducted whose first findings were revealed on 3 July 2015 by Central Finance Minister Arun Jaitley. Mandal Commission report of 1980 quoted OBC population at 52%, though National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) survey of 2006 quoted OBC population at 41%.

There is only one other instance of a caste count in post-independence India. It was conducted in Kerala in 1968 by the Government of Kerala under E. M. S. Namboodiripad to assess the social and economic backwardness of various lower castes. The census was termed Socio-Economic Survey of 1968 and the results were published in the Gazetteer of Kerala, 1971.

History

C. Chandramouli IAS was the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India for the 2011 Indian census. Census data was collected in 16 languages and the training manual was prepared in 18 languages. In 2011, India and Bangladesh also conducted their first-ever joint census of areas along their border. The census was conducted in two phases. The first, the house-listing phase, began on 1 April 2010 and involved collection of data about all the buildings and census houses. Information for the National Population Register was also collected in the first phase. The second, the population enumeration phase, was conducted from 9 – 28 February 2011 all over the country. The eradication of epidemics, the availability of more effective medicines for the treatment of various types of diseases and the improvement in the standard of living were the main reasons for the high decadal growth of population in India.

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