The History of the Indian Census is a fascinating one. Apart from the fact that ancient and medieval India appears to have been familiar with population counts, there is hardly any other country which has had an unbroken chain of regular decennial modern censuses over the last 100 years. Even the World Wars did not deter the country from completing its censuses according to schedule in the concerned census years. There is much that a student of census can learn from the experience of census taking in this great subcontinent. Organising the census of a country so vast and so populous with such a variegated terrain and ethnic composition has been a challenging task. The decennial census reports of India and the individual States are veritable mines of information on every aspect of the life of the people of the country. The attainment of Independence in 1947, the ushering in of democracy and the era of developmental planning have given a new meaning to the population censuses. The scope, concepts, techniques and tabulations had to keep pace with the new requirements.

Considered in terms of social perspective, the census in India has always been an effort to synthesise traditionalism and modernism and to bring out the quantitative indices of the shifts towards modernism of a traditional society. It is this character of the Indian Census that imparts to it a great flexibility, as reflected in the expanding scope of the census and also in the adjustments in the concepts, definitions and operational procedures that have taken place from decade to decade. The story of 'Census in Perspective' is the story of this synthesis of the past and the present. Through various excerpts and tabular statements, Shri S. C. Srivastava has made an attempt in this direction.

There is another dimension of the Census in India. All nations today live in one world and not merely on a single planet. The story of man in one country is a part of the story of humanity in one world. The significance of the Census operations in India can be best appreciated when seen in a comparative setting, which brings together frames for similar operations in the various countries of the world. I am glad that Shri Srivastava has made an attempt in this direction also.

This document thus provides not only the history of Census taking in India with its concomitant procedures but also of the evolution of concepts made use of in the successive decades to provide the student of Census an integrated and continuous picture of the dynamic, demographic and socioeconomic indices thrown up in the different Censuses. The Chapter on Evaluation of Census Data provides the researchers an opportunity to assess the potential errors involved in the Census data and the different checks and balances made use of to minimise the same. The various tables make it possible to have a comparative picture of the different techniques made use of in taking Census both in this country and elsewhere and also the conceptual models used therein.

This has been a labour of love for Shri Srivastava. He had to make sustained efforts for a number of years to complete the project. It is in the fitness of things, that this publication is being brought out in time for the Indian Census Centenary celebration in 1972. It gives me great pleasure to acknowledge the useful contribution of Shri Srivastava.

Source:
Abstracts form 'Indian Census in Perspective' by Srivastava, S C.
Census of India 1971, Census Centenary Monograph No. 1, Monograph Series,
Office of the Registrar General, India, Ministry of Home Affairs,
New Delhi, 1972, pages 414.