India launches on Thursday the task of counting its teeming billion-plus population, with 2.5 million people set to fan out over the country to begin work for the 2011 census. The exercise has formidable challenges -- coverage of a vast geographical area, left-wing rebels and separatists, widespread illiteracy, and people with a bewildering diversity of cultures, languages and customs. "The census is a means of evaluating once in every 10...

Introduction The phenomenon of disability is one of the pressing problems in the world. According to the projections of international agencies, about 10 per cent of the population are affected with physical, mental, sensory and other forms of impairments and around 75 per cent of the disabled population are concentrated in the rural and inaccessible areas of the developing societies. This data is based on recent studies carried out in various...

-The Telegraph Statistician fears 2021 Census resistance Calcutta: The 2021 Census could be in jeopardy because enumerators will face resistance while collecting information in the wake of the CAA-NRC-NPR protests, a former chief statistician of India said on Saturday. The house-listing work that precedes the Census is scheduled to begin from April and it could be the first casualty of this fear. That in turn can severely compromise the Census, Pronab Sen, who...