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Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India, founded in 1961 by
Government of India The Government of India (ISO: ; often abbreviated as GoI), known as the Union Government or Central Government but often simply as the Centre, is the national government of the Republic of India, a federal democracy located in South Asia, c ...
Ministry of Home Affairs An interior ministry (sometimes called a ministry of internal affairs or ministry of home affairs) is a government department that is responsible for internal affairs. Lists of current ministries of internal affairs Named "ministry" * Ministry ...
, for arranging, conducting and analysing the results of the demographic surveys of India including
Census of India The decennial Census of India has been conducted 16 times, as of 2021. While it has been undertaken every 10 years, beginning in 1872 under British Viceroy Lord Mayo, the first complete census was taken in 1881. Post 1949, it has been conducted by ...
and
Linguistic Survey of India The Linguistic Survey of India (LSI) is a comprehensive survey of the languages of British India, describing 364 languages and dialects. The Survey was first proposed by George Abraham Grierson, a member of the Indian Civil Service and a linguist w ...
. The position of Registrar is usually held by a
civil servant The civil service is a collective term for a sector of government composed mainly of career civil servants hired on professional merit rather than appointed or elected, whose institutional tenure typically survives transitions of political leaders ...
holding the rank of
Joint Secretary Joint Secretary to Government of India (often abbreviated as JS, GoI or Union Joint Secretary or Joint Secretary to Union of India) is a post under the Central Staffing Scheme and the third highest non-political executive rank in Government of I ...
.


History

The Indian Census is the largest single source of a variety of statistical information on different characteristics of the people of
India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...
. The first census of India was conducted in the 1870s and attempted to collect data across as much of the country as was feasible. The first of the decennial censuses took place in 1881. Until 1961, responsibility for arranging, conducting and analysing the results of the census was exercised by a temporary administrative structure that was put in place for each census and then dismantled. From that time on, the office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India has existed as a permanent department of central government; each state and union territory has a supervisory Directorate of Census Operations.


British Raj period

Attempts to enumerate population in parts of the Indian subcontinent and, more important, to assess landholdings for revenue purposes, existed before the British Raj and are attested in writings such as those of
Abu'l-Fazl ibn Mubarak Abu'l-Fazl ibn Mubarak, also known as Abul sharma, Abu'l Fadl and Abu'l-Fadl 'Allami (14 January 1551 – 22 August 1602), was the grand vizier of the Mughal emperor Akbar, from his appointment in 1579 until his death in 1602. He was the au ...
and
Muhnot Nainsi Muhnot Nainsi (1610–1670) is known for his studies of the region now encompassed by the state of Rajasthan in India. He was a contemporary of Rathore ruler Jaswant Singh of Marwar. He was son of Jaimal Muhnot, who was senior office holder und ...
. The
British East India Company The East India Company (EIC) was an English, and later British, joint-stock company founded in 1600 and dissolved in 1874. It was formed to trade in the Indian Ocean region, initially with the East Indies (the Indian subcontinent and Southea ...
, too, carried out quantitative exercises in various places and at various times. By 1871–72, when the Raj authorities conducted the first all-India census, the only administrative area of British India that had not already attempted to conduct a region-wide enumeration was Bengal Province. The conduct of censuses in India by the British Raj administration significantly influenced the culture of the country. Peter Gottschalk says that:


1891

Jervoise Athelstane Baines Sir Jervoise Athelstane Baines (17 October 1847 – 26 November 1925) was an administrator in the Indian Civil Service during the period of the British Raj. Early life Baines was the son of Edward Baines, the vicar of Yalding in Kent, and his ...
was in charge of the 1891 census. He adjusted the classification system.


1901

The Census Commissioner for 1901 was H. H. Risley. He was appointed in 1899 and was influenced by Baines. The detailed regulations that he formulated for the exercise were also used for the 1911 census, and the work involved in co-ordinating the various provincial administrations was considerable and detailed.


1911

E. A. Gait was in overall charge of the 1911 census.


1931

In 1929, J. H. Hutton was given the office of Commissioner for the 1931 census. Aside from performing his official duties in the compilation of the subsequent report, he used the experience when writing his personal work, ''Caste in India'', that was published in 1946. The first ever caste based census in India was done in 1931. He encouraged administrators of the
Indian Civil Service The Indian Civil Service (ICS), officially known as the Imperial Civil Service, was the higher civil service of the British Empire in India during British rule in the period between 1858 and 1947. Its members ruled over more than 300 million ...
to write about the various communities with which they were familiar and
Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf or Christopher von Fürer-Haimendorf FRAI (22 June 1909 – 11 June 1995) was an Austrian ethnologist and professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies at London. He spent forty years studying tr ...
says that "... some of the arguments and cultural parallels contained in Part 1 f the 1931 census reportadvanced novel theories perhaps more appropriate to a learned journal that to the pages of an official census report."


1941

W. W. M. Yeatts was appointed Census Commissioner for the 1941 census, which proved to be the last of the
British Raj The British Raj (; from Hindi ''rāj'': kingdom, realm, state, or empire) was the rule of the British Crown on the Indian subcontinent; * * it is also called Crown rule in India, * * * * or Direct rule in India, * Quote: "Mill, who was himsel ...
era. He made almost no changes to the questions that had been asked of respondents previously but was persuaded to introduce a system whereby each person received their own form for completion. Prior to this, the questionnaires had been, according to
Asok Mitra Asok is a common spelling of Ashoka. It may additionally refer to: * Asok (Dilbert), a character in the ''Dilbert'' comic strip * Asok or Asoke, short name for Asok Montri Road or Sukhumvit Soi 21 in Bangkok * Asok BTS Station, a BTS skytrain st ...
, "... a continuous household form for recording characteristics of successive households in a defined locality, which had proved ideal for cross-checking for internal consistency of demographic attributes of each member of a household as well as for manual coding and tabulation". The new individualised method was intended to assist in analysis using
Hollerith machine Herman Hollerith (February 29, 1860 – November 17, 1929) was a German-American statistician, inventor, and businessman who developed an electromechanical tabulating machine for punched cards to assist in summarizing information and, later, in ...
s. The proposal was to conduct a full enumeration of basic data, such as headcount, age and gender, and to conduct a more detailed sampled enumeration of socio-economic and cultural characteristics. It was thought that this approach would save time and money, as well as reduce the extent of problems caused by errors, undercounts and inconsistencies. The census was not a success. It was hampered by the fact that
World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
was ongoing and by India's literacy and education standards. Those standards made it unfeasible to permit self-enumeration by the respondents but the costs and time involved in training enumerators to act on their behalf had not been offset against the perceived benefits of adopting the sampling method. Very little data was produced other than figures for total population and, says Mitra, "The tabulations of the ampledresults on machines were so botched and delayed that even by 1954, no complete tabulations ... had been made. The final results defied coherent interpretation at the state or national level."


Post-independence


1951

The importance of large quantities of detailed and varied demographic data increased as India moved towards adoption of five-year development plans. Yeatts was appointed as Commissioner for the
1951 Census of India The 1951 Census of India was the ninth in a series of censuses held in India every decade since 1872. It is also the first census after independence and Partition of India. 1951 census was also the first census to be conducted under 1948 Census ...
but died in 1948 and was replaced by R. A. Gopalaswami. The new incumbent refused to be swayed, as Yeatts had been, by the arguments of
Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis OBE, FNA, FASc, FRS (29 June 1893– 28 June 1972) was an Indian scientist and statistician. He is best remembered for the Mahalanobis distance, a statistical measure, and for being one of the members of the fi ...
regarding adoption of sampling methods. Mahalanobis had founded the
Indian Statistical Institute Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) is a higher education and research institute which is recognized as an Institute of National Importance by the 1959 act of the Indian parliament. It grew out of the Statistical Laboratory set up by Prasanta C ...
but was no match for Gopalaswami, who successfully argued that the diversity of the Indian populace — such as its multilinguality and multiethnicity — was so extreme that no sample would have any statistical utility for planning purposes. The use of individual enumeration slips, combined with household schedules, was retained but the slips were simplified as much as possible in order to maximise the accuracy of information derived from a population that had limited capabilities.


1961

In discussions concerning the census of 1961, Mahalanobis tried once more to cause the adoption of a sampling system.
Asok Mitra Asok is a common spelling of Ashoka. It may additionally refer to: * Asok (Dilbert), a character in the ''Dilbert'' comic strip * Asok or Asoke, short name for Asok Montri Road or Sukhumvit Soi 21 in Bangkok * Asok BTS Station, a BTS skytrain st ...
had been appointed Commissioner for this census and he, too, was able to counter the idea after demonstrating how cross-checks of the data were performed.


See also

*
Scientific racism Scientific racism, sometimes termed biological racism, is the pseudoscience, pseudoscientific belief that empirical evidence exists to support or justify racism (racial discrimination), racial inferiority, or racial superiority.. "Few tragedies ...
*
2011 Census of India The 2011 Census of India or the 15th Indian Census was conducted in two phases, house listing and population enumeration. The House listing phase began on 1 April 2010 and involved the collection of information about all buildings. Information ...


References

Notes Citations


Further reading

* {{authority control Censuses in India Government agencies of India Statistical organisations in India