The Hindu : Front Page : Census of the homeless tomorrow night

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Sunday, Feb 27, 2011
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Census of the homeless tomorrow night

Raktima Bose

Kolkata: Come this Monday night when most people across the country will be asleep, groups of Census officials and enumerators will hit the roads in various directions in order to count the houseless for Census 2011.

The counting of the houseless is done in the late hours of the last day of Census operations so that the vast number of persons who do not have definite shelters and are not added up during the house-to-house Census operations can be counted.

“The counting will take place all over the country and census directorates of different States will coordinate with the local administration, the police and NGOs to identify pockets that have high houseless concentration,” Purnendu Kumar Banerjee, Deputy Registrar-General (Census), told The Hindu on Saturday.

Sources in the West Bengal Census Directorate said that among their other tasks the enumerators are asked to identify the areas of the city as well as the districts where clusters of shelter-less people come to sleep at night.

Mr. Banerjee said railway stations, marketplaces and bus stands are conventionally areas with high concentration of houseless people. Though the counting is meant to be done at the “Census moment”, that is sharp at midnight, the operations usually start a few hours before midnight and continue till the early hours.

As Kolkata happens to be a hub of financial activities in the eastern part of India and West Bengal shares an international border with Bangladesh, a large inflow of migrant population makes the number of houseless persons here relatively high in comparison to the national average. According to Census 2001, there were 110,535 houseless persons in the State. Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra are the other States with a very high concentration of houseless population, with Maharashtra topping the chart with 340,924 houseless persons.

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