Census fieldwork contradicts government data, enumerators asked to revisit, review data

Key points

• With the ongoing Census exercise throwing up data that differ from government records, particularly on issues such as open defecation and household access to electricity or cooking gas connections, enumerators say they have been asked by senior officials to revisit households and correct the data “discrepancies”.
• Several enumerators, mostly government schoolteachers and anganwadi workers, had taken to social media to report the discrepancies and to flag the glaring inequality and poverty on the ground.
• Some even complained that residents were unwilling to share information, fearing cancellation of government benefits.
• On June 2, the Director of Census Operations (DCO), Rajasthan, wrote to all district functionaries that “during the analysis of field data collected so far, some discrepancies have been noticed”.
• In the letter accessed by The Hindu, the Charge Officers were instructed to “verify the block-level data through the CMMS (Census Management and Monitoring System) portal, in accordance with the actual...