43 | Evolution of Colonial Census - Reflections on Process and Methods

By Gaurav Kalyani and Shivakumar Jolad

Published on 06 November 2026

Introduction

In the Censusnama series, we did a deep dive into each decennial census from 1872 till 1941, exploring how the census was conducted, what it counted and how it evolved through each decade. In this essay, we take a closer look at the process of census taking, how it changed throughout the colonial period and some reflections for the upcoming 2027 census.

India’s 2027 census is being described as the country’s first digital census, with enumerators carrying smartphones, households entering their own details on a portal. Yet the exercise rests on a design that colonial officials had settled by the 1870s: a preliminary listing of every house, followed by a final count at a single ‘census moment’. Many of the difficulties surrounding the 2027 count, from the classification of caste to the willingness of people to answer, were also familiar to the people who were involved in the censuses of 1872 to 1941.

Census before 1872

Historical Context

The history of census-taking in India spans several millennia, evolving from ancient administrative measures designed for statecraft and revenue collection into sophisticated local enumerations during the colonial period. Although India's first synchronous, nationwide population census was established in 1881 following the non-synchronous general census series of 1867–1872, the institutional, conceptual, and methodological foundations of demographic survey work were laid long before 1872.

As we have documented in our Introductory articles on the evolution of Census (History of pre colonial census, knowledge production during colonial era, and the making of modern Census 1850-72), population enumeration has long history with ancient textual references in the Rigveda and Kautilya's Arthashastra, and medieval imperial administration reports like Akbar's Ain-i-Akbari, and Ahom Barunji, to the experimental urban and provincial censuses undertaken by the East India Company and regional British administrations throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.

One of the ways in which the colonial state departed from pre-colonial practice was its interest in counting individual human beings. Indigenous administrations typically counted houses or enclosures. The East India Company, concerned with ‘political arithmetic’ counted which included fertility, natural increase and vagrancy control, wanted men, women, children and even ‘persons in the womb’ (Guha, 2003). Local officials were evidently puzzled, and their returns show awkwardly added columns for wives, kept women, young children and slave women.

Until the mid-nineteenth century population figures rested largely on estimates, and the census was an extension of the revenue state, where knowing the number of people was a way of knowing the value of land. Dr. Buchanan’s ‘plough test’ of 1807–14 assumed five persons for every plough in Bengal and Bihar. In Oudh, estimates assumed 4.5 to 5.5 persons per house, with house totals furnished by zamindars or the police rather than by direct observation (Natarajan, 1971).

Direct experiments mostly occurred in cities. James Prinsep counted Allahabad in 1824 and Benares in 1827, and Henry Walters’s 1830 census of Dhaka classified its people by sex, age group and caste-occupation. Another important milestone was the beginning of Registration of deaths in Calcutta in 1832 and Bombay in 1848, to monitor the health of officials and soldiers, but under-registration, particularly of female births, remained common (Dyson, 2018).

The definitive step towards enumeration came in the North-Western Provinces, where Lieutenant-Governor Thompson had every house in the province numbered at a fixed moment in 1853 (Natarajan, 1971). The 1865 census of the same provinces distinguished children under twelve from adults for the first time and sorted the population into agricultural and non-agricultural groups by caste and occupation (Plowden, 1867). Its forms became the model for later regional censuses. These early efforts still lacked a common reference date. Regions were counted at different times, with no standard training or definitions (Maheshwari, 1996).

A decade of preparations followed that led to what is considered as the first census of British India in 1872. In 1865, the Government of India and the Home Government agreed in principle that a general census would be taken in 1871, and W. C. Plowden worked out model schedules and questionnaires in the same year. Statistical organisation then moved quickly under Lord Mayo, the Governor General. In 1869, W. W. Hunter was appointed Director General of Statistical Survey, and H. Beverley, the Registrar General, organised an experimental census of the Lower Provinces of Bengal. The actual counting of heads took place between 1867 and 1872, wherever it was practicable. The resulting series was uneven in coverage and lacked central supervision, but it used uniform schedules. It also contained the rudiments of all the basic demographic, social and economic tables.

Chronological Summary of Key Pre-1872 Censuses and Surveys

Source: (ORGI, 2023; Kalyani, G., & Jolad, S., 2026)

1871–72: The First Asynchronous Census

The census of 1871–72 was the first attempt at counting the whole of British India, but it was not a single event. It was a collection of provincial operations without a central Census Commissioner, with district collectors and magistrates responsible locally. The machinery relied on unpaid local agencies, mainly the village accountants, known as Putwarees, in rural areas, and ward heads (Mohulladars) or respectable inhabitants in towns. In Bengal, it was undertaken by the police (Maheshwari, 1996; Waterfield, 1875).

The method was a two-step process. For a preliminary record, enumerators visited every house in their ‘beat’, affixed numbers with coloured chalk or wooden tickets, and recorded names, castes and occupations. Then on a moonlit night in January or February, they made a final round to strike out those who had died or left and to add newborns and guests. Proclamations were made asking residents to stay at home with a lamp burning (Natarajan, 1971; Waterfield, 1875). The names of all males were recorded, but the names of female members were left to the discretion of the head of the household. Returns were collated at tehsil and district offices and copied onto colour-coded slips.

This census had considerable limitations. The count was non-synchronous and geographically incomplete, leaving out Oudh, Punjab and Berar, which had been counted recently, as well as most princely states. Alice Clark, a demographic historian of colonial India, therefore rejected it as a scientific baseline because ‘different parts of it were taken in different years’ (quoted in Dyson, 2022). Yet the census was meant as an experiment, preparing the public and the administration for later decennial cycles and serving as an ‘anchor test’ for unreliable vital statistics. Putting it simply, it marked the transition from revenue-based intelligence to statistical governance (Maheshwari, 1996).

The census also left a statutory trace. The undertaking of 1872 stimulated the Bengal Births and Deaths Registration Act of 1873, and the Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Act of 1886 followed later. The 1886 Act was meant to supply the “data for calculation” whose absence H. T. Colebrooke had regretted it as early as 1794. Registration of deaths had already begun, as discussed earlier. The new Acts extended registration to births, deaths and marriages more broadly. In 1872, the census had served as a check on unreliable vital statistics. These laws were an attempt to give the state a continuous source of such figures, so that it would not have to wait for the next count.

1881: The First Synchronous Census

On the night of 17 February 1881, a single enumeration was conducted simultaneously, from the villages of Bengal to the towns of the Punjab and the princely states of Rajputana, on one uniform date, under one controlling authority and according to one standardised method. The Government of India had weighed simultaneous enumeration against a gradual count and largely supported the one-day model, arguing that uniform timing was both desirable and feasible (Plowden, 1883).

By fixing a single reference date and imposing a hierarchy that ran from the village enumerator, all the way to the Census Commissioner, the colonial state constructed a unified data infrastructure (Dyson, 2022).

The method remained two-staged. A preliminary listing ran from December 1880 to February 1881. Because literacy was low, the census relied entirely on trained enumerators rather than on householders filling in their own schedules. Each enumerator was responsible for a block of about sixty houses or 300 persons (Maheshwari, 1996).

Exceptions were made where a single night was impractical such as in nomadic grazing camps which were counted during the day, and mountainous areas where snow made night visits difficult were enumerated in advance. W. C. Plowden, as Census Commissioner for India, presided over a hierarchy of provincial Superintendents and District Officers, and brought feudatory states such as Mysore, Baroda and Hyderabad into uniform imperial tables (Gait, 1912).

The returns were far richer than in 1872. It was the first census to provide a comprehensive age-sex distribution for the whole country, which allowed the actuary G. F. Hardy to prepare life tables despite irregular age returns. His analysis found life expectancy at birth in India to be 23.5 years, against 39.91 years in England (Plowden, 1883). The weaknesses were equally revealing. Only workers were counted for occupation, religion and caste were in the same column, and language returns were admitted to be approximations because enumerators lacked philological expertise (Plowden, 1883).

The step forward in 1881 owed to something that was outside of the census. The problems of coverage and cartography that the 1872 group had exposed were taken up by W. W. Hunter’s Statistical Survey and by the Survey of India. This helped make a synchronous and comprehensive count possible under Plowden, with more effort going into classifying demographic, economic and social characteristics. The census also reached well beyond population totals. For over eighty years it fed one of the most thorough inquiries into social structure conducted anywhere in the world, and it was responsible for the Linguistic Survey of India. The census was imperfect on language, but it still produced a systematic survey of it. 

Evolution of Indian Census 1891–1941

Later censuses refined and built up on this model rather than replacing it. These censuses have collected information on the distribution of population, with respect to its density, physical groups, urban and rural distribution, housing condition, migration, occupation, racial distribution, literacy, religion, physical deformities, sex, civil condition etc.

The 1891 Census of India was directed by Census Commissioner J. A. Baines following the pivotal 1889 Agra Conference. Operating on the night of February 26, 1891, the operation employed a two-stage synchronous method executed by roughly one million local enumerators. Methodologically, the census introduced major refinements by recording dependents under occupational returns to capture the complete supporting power of each livelihood, while separating religion, sect, caste, and sub-caste into four distinct schedule columns. It also operationalized literacy by distinguishing learners from fully literate individuals and tracking knowledge of English. Despite consuming nearly 290 tons of paper across 70 million schedules printed in 17 characters, the operation proved remarkably cost-effective at Rs. 10.81 per 1,000 persons.

The 1901 Census, initiated by Commissioner H. H. Risley and completed by E. A. Gait, mobilized over 1.3 million volunteer enumerators structured in a strict hierarchy of blocks, circles, and charges. Risley instituted a controversial classification of caste based on social precedence and anthropometric measurements, while literacy was standardized to require reading and writing a letter. The administrative efficiency of the operation allowed provisional national totals to be telegraphed within two weeks of the count at a significantly reduced overall cost.

The 1911 census was directed by E. A. Gait, utilizing a workforce of nearly two million enumerators. This census marked a major step toward international statistical standardization by adopting a modified version of Monsieur Bertillon’s occupational classification system, which categorized livelihoods across four broad classes down to 169 specific groups. It also launched the first Special Industrial Schedule to detail factory establishments employing 20 or more workers. To overcome widespread age-heaping and unintentional misstatements, the census integrated an actuarial report by Mr. Ackland to mathematically smooth raw age returns and calculate life expectancies. Additionally, administrators successfully managed complex territorial recalculations necessitated by the ongoing political fallout and impending reversal of the 1905 Partition of Bengal.

J. T. Marten led the 1921 census shifting its analytical scope, following a 1920 Government of India resolution, toward economic metrics over descriptive ethnography. This census occurred under the shadow of two unprecedented crises. First,the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic, which claimed 12 to 13 million lives and wiped out seven years of natural population growth, and second, Mahatma Gandhi's Non-Cooperation Movement. Marten abandoned the problematic category of "Animism" in favor of "Tribal Religions" and maintained strict literacy standards across provinces. Although administrative costs rose to Rs. 14 per 1,000 persons, the manual slip-sorting system delivered a final count that differed from provisional estimates by only 0.04 percent.

Directed by anthropologist J. H. Hutton under the Census Act of 1929, the 1931 Census was conducted by over two million volunteer enumerators. A defining breakthrough of this count was the first systematic enumeration of the "exterior castes" (depressed classes) using localized social disability criteria, recording over 50 million individuals. Hutton also commissioned groundbreaking special studies, including a sample inquiry into reproduction covering 900,000 families, B. S. Guha’s anthropometric caste survey, and L. S. Vaidyanathan's actuarial life tables. Field operations faced severe disruption from Congress's Civil Disobedience Movement, as well as competitive communal over-reporting driven by impending constitutional reforms.

The 1941 Census was conducted eighteen months into World War II under Census Commissioner M. W. M. Yeatts. Facing severe wartime constraints, Yeatts executed sweeping structural reforms: he replaced the single-night count with a 10–15 day continuous enumeration ending at sunrise on March 1, 1941. He reclassified respondents. by broad "community" rather than religion, which raised the recorded tribal population share to 6.6 percent. Additionally, Delhi became the first unit, during this census, to test mechanical tabulation on Hollerith punched card machines. This wartime census was comparatively much limited and was cut short due to wartime austerity. Age, livelihood, literacy, birthplace and caste were not tabulated for British India, and the slips were stored unsorted.

Census Coverage

The ‘all-India’ census was never quite all of India, and its boundaries moved at almost every round. Table 1 sets out the population enumerated and the main change in coverage at each census.

Table 1: Population enumerated and changes in coverage, 1871–72 to 1941

(Source: Census extracts; figures are not strictly comparable across years)

Coverage seems to have grown outward from the core of British provinces, with princely states entering in 1881 and later censuses reaching towards hills, borderlands and islands. Between the decades, many boundaries were redrawn. The 1905 partition of Bengal and its reversal in 1912 meant that the 1911 report had to adjust the 1901 figures to match the new territorial adjustments (Gait, 1913).

The separation of Burma removed a province from the count of 1941. The exclusions were usually administrative. Oudh, Punjab and Berar were skipped in 1872 because a new count was thought a waste of money, and where counting was impractical, estimates were made. For example, in 1941, the census enumerated 753,261 persons in the trans-border areas of the North-West Frontier Province and estimated a further 1,624,338.

Data Analysis

The processing, compilation, and tabulation of census data in India underwent a major technological and administrative evolution between 1872 and 1941. As the scale of enumeration grew to encompass hundreds of millions of individuals, colonial census authorities repeatedly adapted their methods. They shifted from labor-intensive manual tick marks to colored paper slips, testing early punch-card machinery, and introducing statistical sampling.

Between 1872 to 1891, enumerators recorded families on large household schedules, from which copyists manually transcribed entries using tally marks ("ticks") on giant abstraction sheets at local offices. It was a slow method, prone to errors. To streamline compilation, Census Commissioner H. H. Risley introduced the "slip system" in 1901, which served through 1931. Schedule details were transcribed onto color- and shape-coded paper slips representing religion, sex, and marital status, then manually sorted into wooden pigeon-hole compartments. This drastically reduced clerical errors and enabled provisional population totals to be telegraphed within two weeks.

Although electric punch-card tabulation was evaluated in 1921 and 1931, administrators rejected it as three times more expensive than manual sorting and ill-suited for complex regional scripts and caste classifications. It was finally utilized in the 1941 census, as an experiment in Delhi where Yeatts used Hollerith 80-column punched-card machinery for tabulation.

Facing wartime constraints, the 1941 Census under M. W. M. Yeatts instituted the most radical processing overhaul by abolishing household schedules in favor of individual paper slips bound into pads of 100. Enumerators marked standardized, script-free symbols directly onto slips in the field, completely eliminating the error-prone intermediate copying step in central sorting offices. He also introduced systematic sampling by marking every 50th slip (the 2% "Y-Sample"). Although full wartime tabulation for British India was suspended, these preserved sample slips were retrieved between 1948 and 1956 by P. C. Mahalanobis at the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) to reconstruct vital age, fertility, and livelihood tables for undivided India.

In 1944, the Government set up a Population Data Committee to examine the available data on population growth. It was chaired by Yeatts, the Census Commissioner of 1941, and its members were Sir Theodore Gregory, P. C. Mahalanobis, K. B. Madhava and K. C. K. E. Raja. Its immediate concern was the age tabulation of the 1941 census, which financial stringency during the Second World War had left incomplete. It also looked ahead. It recommended sampling methods for estimating vital statistics rates, and it pointed out that the household lists prepared at the census could serve as a sampling frame, so they should be kept safely. The household lists it wanted kept are the same kind of record that the houselisting of 2026 would produce. 

The colonial census also produced demographic work that is easily overlooked. Kingsley Davis, modern demographer of India and Pakistan, regretted the apparent lack of “statistical ingenuity” in the Indian census, yet the age and life-table studies of 1881 and 1891 were substantial. They included:

• Baines on age distribution in Bombay and Sind (1881)

• McIver on Madras (1881)

• Gabriel Stokes’s native life tables for the Madras Presidency (1881)

• Drew on Bombay (1891)

• Stuart’s life table for the city of Madras (1891)

• M. M. Khan’s life tables for the Nizam’s Dominions (1891)

• Narasimmiyengar on age and the sex ratio in Mysore (1891)

It was built up on the work of past actuaries beginning with Hardy, who devised ways of building age and life tables from inadequate and often unsatisfactory returns. The census also did not stay tied to precedent. It broke new ground at nearly every round without losing comparability with earlier ones. 

The Census Moment

J. H. Hutton noted that the two-stage method, together with the general immobility of the population, made it possible to get a reasonably accurate count on a single night across a subcontinent. He conceded, however, that the census was never fully synchronous. Snow arrived in some Himalayan districts long before February, so those populations were counted the previous autumn (Hutton, 1932; Shirras, 1935).

Today the 2027 census keeps that skeleton. Houselisting ran between April and September 2026, with a 30-day window for each state or union territory. Population enumeration is scheduled for February 2027 against a reference date of 00:00 on 1 March 2027, which the official press release itself calls the ‘census moment’. Ladakh and the snow-bound areas of Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand use a reference date of 1 October 2026 (Press Information Bureau, n.d.). Evidently, the problem of weather and terrain that shaped the colonial census process, remains.

Census Laws

The colonial census ran on a temporary law. The 1872 census rested on executive authority and persuasion rather than on a dedicated statute. By the census of 1881, the government judged that cooperation could not be left to goodwill, and a Census Act of 1880 was passed to oblige people to take part. Like the legislation that followed, it lapsed once the census ended (Kumar, 2016).

The Census Act of 1929 (Act X of 1929) was passed before a Census Commissioner had even been appointed, so Hutton had little chance to ask for the powers he needed. Its penalties were adequate for occasional uncooperative individuals but not for large-scale organised resistance. A Permanent law was debated but ultimately refused. Gait raised that idea in 1909 and Hutton urged it after 1931, but in 1938 the Home Department concluded that a temporary Act should continue (Kumar, 2016).

Independent India reversed the approach. The Census Act, 1948, piloted by Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and passed unanimously in September 1948, is permanent. It makes service as a census officer a duty, requires the enumerated to answer questions, punishes abetment and tampering, and makes census records confidential. The release for 2027 leans on the last provision, stating that under Section 15 personal information cannot be disclosed under the RTI Act, used as evidence in court or shared with any institution (Press Information Bureau, n.d.). A permanent Act ensures continuity and stronger privacy, but, as the reports of 1921 and 1931 show, it cannot supply the willing cooperation of staff and respondents.

Another committee approached the population from the side of public health. The Health Survey and Development Committee, popularly known as the Bhore Committee (1943-1946), under the chairmanship of Sir Joseph William Bhore, was constituted to plan post-war developments in health. It reviewed the field of population from both the quantitative and the qualitative points of view. To improve the quality of population statistics, it suggested a Registrar General of Vital and Population Statistics at the centre and Provincial Superintendents in the provinces. One of its chief recommendations was that “the population problem should be the subject of continuous study”. This marks a shift away from the colonial pattern of temporary, census-by-census arrangements towards a standing statistical system. 

From Enumerators to Self-Enumeration

Unlike European censuses, where residents filled in their own schedules, the Indian census relied on enumerators because most people could not read or write (Maheshwari, 1996). This shaped the entire machinery of enumerators and supervisors. The enumerator was also an interpreter of local life. In rural areas the Putwaree served because of his intimate knowledge of residents’ domestic concerns (Maheshwari, 1996).

In 2027, households can for the first time enumerate themselves. A self-enumeration portal, available in sixteen languages, allows a household to submit its details and receive a Self-Enumeration ID, which the enumerator uses to confirm the data during the visit (Press Information Bureau, n.d.). Although it is a hybrid rather than a replacement, since the enumerator still need to visit and verify. But it introduces a new kind of literacy barrier.

According to NFHS-5 benchmark, only 33% percent of women have used internet, compared with 57% percent of men (India Data Insights, 2026). It echoes Baines’s remark that ‘reticence about this portion of the household is by no means uncommon, more particularly in the north of India’, made while discussing girls aged ten to fifteen (Baines, 1893). Whoever mediates between household and record, whether a putwaree, a teacher or a portal, shapes who appears in the count.

Public Suspicion and Pandemics

Census-taking was a negotiated interaction between the state and the public. Historically, the census takers had to tackle wild rumors and suspicions about the census process. In 1872, many inhabitants viewed the census as a precursor to taxation, conscription or forced labour, and called the census paper a ‘tax ticket’, since it was believed that the government would never undertake such an expensive task without seeking a profit. Rumours held that surplus population would be shipped to Mauritius or Assam, and that the exercise was a subterfuge to secure wives for European soldiers, which reportedly led many families to marry off their young daughters prematurely (Natarajan, 1971; Waterfield, 1875). The government’s answer was three years of public instruction. By 1891, Baines could observe ‘a certain growth of confidence, as well as of population’ (Baines, 1893).

Suspicion later took quieter forms. In 1931, a separate schedule for the ‘educated unemployed’ went out in large numbers and very few came back. Recipients in Madras asked why they should fill in a form from a government that had no job to give them. The mostly Indian unemployed of Rangoon feared repatriation, and the unemployed Bhadralok of Bengal suspected they were being listed as political suspects. In other words, people answered according to what they believed the data was for.

Hutton’s 1931 census made the first attempt to enumerate the ‘exterior castes’, a term he preferred to ‘depressed classes’. The count was 50,195,770 people, about 14 per cent of the total population (Shirras, 1935). Table 2 shows how widely earlier estimates had ranged.

Table 2: Estimates of the depressed classes before the 1931 enumeration

(Source: Shirras, 1935; census extracts)

Trina Vithayathil (2025) argues that the postcolonial census counted caste only for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, a practice that treats caste as a problem of the oppressed and keeps the privilege of others invisible, which she calls ‘castelessness’. Her study of the 2011 attempt shows how bureaucratic deflection moved the planned caste count out of the census and into the Socio-Economic and Caste Census, whose caste data was deemed unusable and never published (Vithayathil, 2025). She has urged that questions be pretested, caste lists be built with the states, and the 2011 data be analysed before the 2027 instrument is designed (Kalia, 2025).

Reporting on the notified questionnaire suggests that Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe respondents choose from fixed lists while others type into an open field, which critics fear repeats the problem of 2011. Hutton’s complaint that the decision on listing the depressed classes came too late to produce a common code finds relevance here.

On the night of 18 March 1921, enumerators went door to door across a subcontinent still recovering from war, famine and the influenza epidemic. Census Commissioner J. T. Marten wrote that the epidemic had ‘wiped out in a few months practically the whole natural increase in the population for the previous seven years.’

The enumerated population rose by only about 1.2 per cent, from 315.2 million in 1911 to 318.9 million. The census went ahead because the machinery already existed. The pandemic was also part of what the census had to measure, in a system where vital registration remained defective.

India’s 2021 census, in contrast, was postponed, because of a similar pandemic of Covid-19, and then rescheduled repeatedly, so that the 2027 count comes sixteen years after the last.

Shadow of Colonial Census

What persists are three questions that no technology answers on its own. The first is who is counted. Coverage has always been a decision shaped by cost, terrain and sovereignty, and women, girls, nomads and migrants have been counted unevenly. Himalayan populations were counted in autumn because snow made winter visits impossible. In 1941, parts of the frontier were estimated rather than enumerated. This same pattern continues even today. The 2027 census will count snow-bound regions of Ladakh, Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand against an earlier reference date.

The second is by what category. Every colonial revision changed what the state could see. The separation of religion and caste into distinct columns in 1891, Risley's ranking of castes by social precedence in 1901, and Hutton's enumeration of the "exterior castes" in 1931 each altered the picture of Indian society and gave it political weight. Categories were never merely technical; they became resources in public life. The debate over the caste census of 2027 continues this long argument. The concern that Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe respondents will choose from fixed lists while others type into an open field recalls Hutton's own complaint that decisions on classification came too late to produce a common code.

The third is whether people believe enough in the exercise to answer truthfully. The wild rumours, especially about the ‘tax tickets’ plagued the early colonial census, while later ones saw attempts to gerrymander the enumeration efforts, especially in 1941 census. The 2027 census faces similar challenges, as the state attempts to educate people about the upcoming census and assure them that it has nothing to do with income tax assessments, through awareness campaigns using public figures and celebrities.

The colonial census did not just stay tied to a precedent, but also broke new ground at each round, without losing much comparability with earlier ones. The 2027 census inherits this same habit, however, the colonial census underscores that innovation is not the same as improvement. The digital census will be faster and cheaper, yet it does not guarantee complete accuracy. The census of 2027 will be judged first on its technology and speed. In the longer run, it is likely to be judged as its predecessors were - on whether the state counted everyone it said it would, in categories people recognised, and whether people believed enough in the exercise to answer truthfully.

In the next article in this series, we’ll take a closer look at how the census evolved after independence. How was the first census after independence conducted in 1951, what it changed fundamentally and what it carried forward, along with an assessment of all the following censuses till 2011.

(Authors: Gaurav Kalyani works as Research Associate at the Center for Legislative Education and Research, FLAME University, Pune;

Dr. Shivakumar Jolad works as Associate Professor (Public Policy), and is the Chair of Center for Legislative Education and Research and Director India State Stories, FLAME University, Pune

Gaurav did primary research and writing;  Shivakumar contriuted to conceptualization, research and editing)

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