Thaindian News

New Delhi, Feb 2 (ANI): Union Home Minister P.Chidambaram unveiled the mascot of Census enumerator here on Wednesday.

The enumeration process for Census 2011 begins on February 9 and would continue till February 28. House listing and housing census and collection of data on National Population Register (NPR) was done in the first phase from April to September 2010. During the second phase, 2.7 million enumerators and supervisors will visit house to house for counting purposes.

Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India, Dr. C. Chandramauli gave details about the mammoth exercise, which entails an expenditure of Rs.2200 crore.

For enumeration purpose Rs. 2.47 million blocks have been made to count population of approximately 240 million households.

Dr. C. Chandramauli said that the omissions rate in the Indian Census is around 1.7 per cent, which is well within international norms and the effort in the ongoing Census is to further reduce this rate. For population enumeration, 29 questions have been devised on demographic, marital status, cultural, literacy, economic, migration, travel to place of work and fertility parameters.

Certain new features have been added to the 2011 census. These include, state of art designing of the schedules; new/revised questions on the institutional house hold, new category in gender parameter; a separate code for separated and divorced; new codes under status of school attendance and a separate code included under non economic activity.

Census 2011 has also introduced new initiatives to sensitise school students about census operations. A toll free number and services of call centre have been introduced for grievances from public.

Census 2011 will be using more developed ICR technology with advanced features so as to ensure faster completion of work and bringing down to one to two years, the time taken to complete this process from four to five years in 2001. (ANI)