Census will be conducted electronically and every person will have right to fill the data: Amit Shah

India will now conduct census electronically and every person will have the right to fill the data, said Home Minister Amit Shah in New Delhi on Monday.

New Delhi: Asserting that the government of India will now conduct the census electronically, in which every person will have the right to fill in the data, Home Minister Amit Shah on Monday said that the process will be verified and audited and it will include more than 35 parameters of socio-economic status.

“Under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the new census will become the basis for developing the country in a completely all-encompassing and all-inclusive manner. Earlier, there was no link between the census and people making plans for development,” said Amit Shah while inaugurating Janganana Bhavan in New Delhi.

Shah said that registration of birth and death is very important for any country and it helps in making development plans between two censuses. “Now government led by Prime Minister Modi is making this process easier by making it online,” said Shah. He said that today the history of all the Censuses since 1981 has been compiled and published in the form of a book. “Accountability can only be expected when responsibilities are fixed, and with the launch of upgraded SRS mobile application with geofencing today, employees at even the lowest level will become more responsible,” he said.

Shah said that the Census is the process of charting the course of development of the country, for this it is necessary that the SRS upgraded mobile application along with geofencing should create an alert system so that the officials doing the census will not go out of the allotted area. He said that many organizations are being established across the nation to provide analysis related to development, along with professional advice, to the states, districts and tehsils and their professional competence should be used to speed up the development of the country. “For the analysis purpose, they should be provided with all the Census literature and the online sale of all Census publications, which has been initiated from today, will prove to be of great benefit to the planners and researchers,” said Shah.

He said that for many years the development of the country was only demand-based and piecemeal. He said that for the all-around and all-inclusive development of a country with such a huge geographical diversity, it is essential that development planning is based on data, for which we have no better means than Census.

He said that the data which should be available for development was not there in the earlier censuses, nor was there a system for its analysis. Shah said that basic amenities like water, electricity, housing, and health were not available for almost 70 years after the independence because no one knew the availability of the necessary budget required for them. “The government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi will provide facilities to the poor by proper analysis of the data. Schemes were made, targets were fixed but there was no initiative to fix the targets of providing houses to all because no one knew how much budget was required for this purpose,” he said.

He said that such usage of Census was not possible earlier due to lack of access, accuracy, online unavailability of Census and bridge between planning and Census. Shah said that the central government is going to make such a system that as soon as a person turns 18, the Election Commission will take information from him and make his voter card. “Similarly, in case of death of someone, its information will be sent to the Election Commission from the Census Registrar and then, his name will be removed from the voter list as per process,” Shah said.