The unlovely spectrum of political corruption, these are particularly ugly practices. Party leaders should be particularly severe on such colleagues. On March 28, 2019, GoI formally notified its intent to start work on Census 2021. Three years on, Parliament was informed this week that on account of Covid field activities for the census have been put off till further orders. That an odd argument. Normalisation of social and economic activity is complete and multiple assembly elections have been held since 2020. Yet field work on India richest data set keeps getting postponed. Defending this by pointing out that key indicators can be extrapolated from Census 2011 is nowhere near good enough. India first census year was 1872. Since then, census field work was never missed. The motivation for it is that a census requires enumeration of individual units such as a household. It, therefore, provides foundational data also used for working sampling frames of subsequent surveys. A census is no longer merely an enumeration of population. It spans critical data that feed into the creation of a demographic, social and economic profile of the population. Therefore, succeeding rounds have built on experience to expand the coverage. To illustrate, there were 14 questions in the 1951 census. By 2011, these had increased to 29. Given the unquestionable importance of this decadal exercise, its postponement for reasons that are not quite convincing is triggering speculation. Some of that speculation has been addressed by GoI recently. For example, census data won be used to create a National Register of Citizens NRC as the statutory law governing census operations restricts it to the use of aggregated data. That leaves two other suggestions that have gained traction. An innovation that is to feature in Census 2021 is self-enumeration. While details are not in the public domain, there have been suggestions that Census 2021 provides an opportunity to get an accurate picture of the pandemic-induced mortality. Perhaps the most contentious suggestion is the one raised by many political parties on using Census 2021 to enumerate population based on castes. PostIndependence, caste enume The unlovely spectrum of political corruption, these are particularly ugly practices. Party leaders should be particularly severe on such colleagues. On March 28, 2019, GoI formally notified its intent to start work on Census 2021. Three years on, Parliament was informed this week that on account of Covid field activities for the census have been put off till further orders. That an odd argument. Normalisation of social and economic activity is complete and multiple assembly elections have been held since 2020. Yet field work on India richest data set keeps getting postponed. Defending this by pointing out that key indicators can be extrapolated from Census 2011 is nowhere near good enough. India first census year was 1872. Since then, census field work was never missed. The motivation for it is that a census requires enumeration of individual units such as a household. It, therefore, provides foundational data also used for working sampling frames of subsequent surveys. A census is no longer merely an enumeration of population. It spans critical data that feed into the creation of a demographic, social and economic profile of the population. Therefore, succeeding rounds have built on experience to expand the coverage. To illustrate, there were 14 questions in the 1951 census. By 2011, these had increased to 29. Given the unquestionable importance of this decadal exercise, its postponement for reasons that are not quite convincing is triggering speculation. Some of that speculation has been addressed by GoI recently. For example, census data won be used to create a National Register of Citizens NRC as the statutory law governing census operations restricts it to the use of aggregated data. That leaves two other suggestions that have gained traction. An innovation that i