15th National Census 2011 already started in India. The first Census was held way back in 1872 and it has been continuing in every 10 years since then. So what is so special this time??? India is the second populous country in the world having nearly 1.2 billion population, So from this simple figure it can be guessed what could be the scale of operation it is gonna to be.
It is estimated to be there will more than 2.5 million people going to be part of this process and the estimated cost is around 22100 million rupees (Which comes from tax payers pocket). And to record the information, Around 12,000 Metric Tonnes of paper will be utilized for printing 64 crores Census Forms and 50 lakhs Instruction Manuals. (This indirectly promote global warming, Imagine how many tree will fell down for this :-) just a thought).
Interestingly this time, the information collected will be stored electronically and every citizen will be given the ID cards for it. The Unique ID project will be used to give every citizen a unique ID which will be containing photos, some bio metric identification (Fingerprint or retina scan blah blah, remember Tom Cruse in Minority Report). The information would contain all your details including telephone numbers, your Qualifications and many more thing. And this data will be kept confidential.
So the question is, What is the importance of Census information. I remember one line from a movie "Boys" where it was told that "Inpormation is Wealth" (Its Inpormation not Information in Tamil Accent). When you have information about all the citizen in the country, this helps in proper planning and finding problem in different geography. And distribution of Unique card will help in streamlining problems. Proper schemes can be launched after analyzing the data. This would finally help the common man in long term.
