By IANS,
New Delhi: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was Saturday enumerated for Census 2011. He urged the people to take part in the national population counting process as it forms the base for planning the level of India’s economic and social activities.
“The census of India is the most massive operation for compiling statistics anywhere in the world. Some of this data form an important base for planning the level of our economic and social activities and it constitutes an important input in the processes of planning and development,” Singh said after he and his family were enumerated.
He urged the people to participate in the exercise to “ensure that each one of our citizens is enumerated properly and that this enumeration will constitute a treasure house of information for planning our development work.”
Census-2011, the world’s biggest administrative exercise in the second most populous nation after China, began April 1 when President Pratibha Patil was enumerated as the first citizen of India.
The gigantic exercise – the 15th headcount of India’s population since 1872 – is being undertaken in two phases to create a database on demography, economic activity, literacy and education, housing and household amenities, urbanisation, fertility and mortality, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, language, religion and migration.
The exercise is being conducted in two phases — house-listing and population count. Over the next year, about 2.5 million census officials would visit households in more than 7,000 towns and 600,000 villages in the country.
They have begun the process of house-listing, which records information on homes. The headcount of people will take place Feb 9-28, 2011. The full census results will be released in mid-2011.