Census 2027 has got underway six years late and is shadowed by an unusual level of public unease. It is India’s first digital census, which the government frames as a leap of modernisation but it still involves nearly 33 lakh government schoolteachers and frontline workers fanning out across the nation in punishing summer heat, smartphones in hand, to complete a 33-question schedule, household by household. And this is still only Part 1 of the exercise.

The promises of a digital census are familiar: real-time data uploads, provisional results available in days, and final figures released in months rather than years. Built-in validation checks and geo-tagging are intended to reduce transcription errors and undercounting, while digital dashboards supposedly offer administrators better oversight of field staff. But we must still ask: can this digital census fairly count all Indians, given the horror stories we continue to hear about data-driven exclusion?

The push for a digital census has unfolded amid recent failures in other digital initiatives of the government. Most notable is the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, which in the first two phases has led to the deletion of more than 5.2 crore names across twelve states and Union territories.

Not only does the Census share the same exhausted pool of school teachers and the same fragile digital infrastructure as the SIR, it is being conducted amid suspicion that this counting exercise too will put citizens through eligibility tests, leading to exclusion.

The mistrust is not unfounded. In West Bengal, the SIR’s automated data-matching protocol introduced an all-new category of suspicion — named ‘logical discrepancy’ by the Election Commission of India, which red-flagged 91.46 lakh voters. The system was designed to cross-reference newer records with a digitised 2002 database to trace lineage, but because many historical records were in Bengali, automated translation frequently misread regional spellings and phonetics. Also, families were red-flagged over issues like a parent-child age gap of less........

© National Herald