The essence of a register-based census is to establish a population register containing the names and addresses of all persons in the country with some of their demographic characteristics. It has to be updated on a continuous basis so as to have the population size at the national and sub-national levels along with population characteristics. It will enable quick availability of population data at a lower cost than the census.

NPR can also serve as a robust sampling frame for sample surveys that may be necessary for obtaining supplementary data on health, living standards, etc.

Traditionally, beginning with the first census in 1872, the Indian census was based on canvasser method. It involved gathering of the social, demographic, economic and cultural characteristics of every individual by interview. A large number of enumerators, mostly teachers, were employed to visit house to house to collect these data.

For the 2011 Census, it is expected that more than 2.5 million enumerators would be employed. In addition to regular enumeration, they would prepare a household form containing some essential particulars of every household and every individual in it as part of NPR preparation for future use.

With the improvement in technology, the census methodology has also been improving from census to census. The most formidable problem faced in the post-enumeration phase of each census has been the enormous delay in processing and producing the results.

This was mainly due to manual tabulation of a huge volume of enumeration records in earlier years and delay in keying in the entire data from the 1971 Census onwards. As against nearly eight years in completing the publication of census results in 1991, the 2001 census information was released in about four years’ time thanks to adoption of ICR technology.

The 2011 Census has plans to cut down the delay further to two to three years adopting new technology even at the stages of census planning and census taking.

The register-based census is adopted by some of the countries since the traditional census is time-consuming, costly and does not get the full cooperation from the public. Added to this is the unwillingness of persons temporarily employed as enumerators to go house to house to collect the data.

Population register has been successfully developed by several countries including Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the Scandinavian countries and Singapore. Countries such as the U.S., Canada and the U.K. still follow the conventional method of collecting census data through questionnaire in the census year.

The switchover from conventional census to a register-based census is not that easy as it may seem to be. Apart from updating, it has to be linked to other records as people move, change their marital status, take up different jobs, progress in education, beget children and die. It has to be linked with birth and death registration. Migration data have also got to be linked.

There should be a legal provision to make it obligatory for individuals to report changes of addresses and other changes in status. It should also be able to tackle privacy issues that might crop up regarding data matching and linkage with other sources. The civil registration system which is not complete in most of the States and Union Territories has to be revamped to provide reliable data. A separate body is expected to handle and manage the data base created for NPR by the census authorities.

Though the initial thinking to explore the possibility of shifting to a register-based census from the traditional count after 2011 is laudable, there is a long way to go and lot of home work needs to be done before it is put into operation.

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