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| Edited By: DNA |Source: DNA |Updated: Sep 25, 2019, 07:05 AM IST
Trust the technically skilled top BJP leadership to come up with out-of-the-box ideas. Union Home Minister Amit Shah has said the Census 2021 data will be collected through a mobile app – in other words, for the first time, a digital census.
For the 2021 census, the reference date is October 1, 2020, for Jammu and Kashmir and snow-bound areas of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, while for the rest of country it is March 1, 2021. This exercise will be carried out in 16 languages at a cost of Rs 12,000 crore. Such critical data, in an intensely information-driven age, needs to be put to good use.
The government plans to make Census 2021 the base for the country’s future planning, development initiatives, and welfare schemes, should be welcome. For far too long, Census data has been used as no better than a number-crunching exercise, which is significant, but in today’s digital age, the threshold level needs to be raised significantly higher.
According to Shah, the Modi government had, on the basis of the 2011 Census, planned 22 welfare schemes related to electricity connection to every home, gas connection, construction of roads, houses for the poor, toilets, bank accounts and opening of bank branches, among other steps.
The Home Minister cited the example of the government’s flagship ‘Ujjwala’ scheme of providing free LPG connections to poor families, saying it has been successful as the scheme was prepared on the basis of the 2011 Census data. Such information will also help in demarcating boundaries of municipal wards, assembly, and Lok Sabha constituencies. Such an option opens up the way for a more thoroughgoing delimitation that the country needs urgently.
