Census call: India’s emergence must get its balancing act right

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The Union government is reportedly planning to conduct India’s much-delayed decadal census exercise in 2025 and complete it the year after.

This decision, welcome as it is in view of the criticality of Census data for a host of policy calls, especially welfare-related, is likely to open a can of worms. This is because of the Vajpayee government’s 2002 decision that delimitation would be undertaken following the “first census after 2026." Given the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s much stronger base in north India than in the south, any re-drawing of Parliamentary seats based on an updated headcount will work in the BJP’s favour.

Hence, notwithstanding the urgent need for delimitation to qualify as a truly representative democracy—instead of some members of the Lok Sabha representing many more people than others—the northward tilt in power it would imply is sure to be controversial. It is this fear of a diminished voice at the Centre that recently led the chief ministers of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh to urge people in their states to go for larger families.

However, as D. Subbarao, former governor of the Reserve Bank of India, argued in a newspaper op-ed, the country still has a population problem; and the solution “is not for states that have reduced family sizes to engineer a population reversal; the solution… is to even the distribution of population across the country." How does one do that? Subbarao suggests greater internal migration, citing the example of the US, which largely owes its position as the top global power to being a melting pot of ethnicity, religion, language and more.

On paper, this seems like an ideal way out. Unlike the US, which attracts people from other