Senior Congress leader Sonia Gandhi Monday expressed her deep concern over the unprecedented delay in India’s decennial census, which has been postponed for nearly four years. In a speech before the Rajya Sabha, she added that extensive use of outdated population data has caused millions of people who were eligible for the benefits under the National Food Security Act (NFSA) to be excluded from such health and nutrition services.
Sonia Gandhi cited budget allocations, saying that this should implicate the government’s plans of not doing the census this year and delaying crucial revisions in welfare schemes. In fact, India’s ever-increasing population is actually at the heart of the continued reliance on outdated data from the 2011 census because more than 140 million people turned out to be entitled to food benefits through the NFSA. She called on the government to immediately take action, and no eligible person should be left in the cold.
Various socio-economic planning measures depend on the decennial census, which was supposed to be held in 2021. It serves as an important source of demographic data for policymakers, and it is a base for determining quotas of welfare programs. Discussions on caste enumeration have also stalled as many political groups have been asking for it to know the socio-economic status of different communities.
Furthermore, Gandhi observed that the delayed census would hamper the taking on, or rather the implementation of, certain key reforms, such as the delimitation exercise that will determine the proportionate representation of states in the Parliament. It also impacts the enforcement of the Women’s Reservation Act, or the Act to provide for the constitution of reservation for women in the House of the People and in the State Legislative Assemblies, 2002′ (passage in 2023), under the mandate of newly available census data.
Gandhi called the delay an unprecedented event in India’s history since independence, describing what it meant to ‘represent food security.’ “It is a fundamental right. The government was urged to conduct the census without further delay and correct the exclusion of deserving people from food security programs.
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