The date of birth won’t be settled anytime soon, so someone calls for cups of chai. “How can you possibly be 35 years old if you were born in 1973? Do the calculation, you should be 37 now,” Prakash Chand Meena, a Census enumerator, tells one of the men of House No 438, a double-storeyed house in one of the alleys of Uttam Nagar, a West Delhi neighbourhood. The math foxes the man and he tries again. “Isn’t it 35,” he mumbles.
Meena, a 26-year-old Sanskrit teacher at a government school in West Delhi, is one of the 2.5 million Census enumerators who have fanned out across the length and breadth of the country, carrying out the mammoth task of counting every resident of the country. Theirs is no easy task, as Meena and his fellow enumerators have by now figured.
Meena's colleague at his school, A K Sinha, also an enumerator, joked about how an enumerator isn't always the person people want to see when they answer the doorbell. Worse, they get mistaken for salesmen. "If we are not dressed properly and not shaven, people wouldn't even let us in their homes, let alone give us a chair to sit on. Despite the awareness campaign, many people are hostile and cannot understand why we want to know when they were born and how long they have been living in a certain place. Landlords don't want us to survey tenants, housewives want to wait till husbands get home, and everybody has a problem remembering the exact year when members of their family are born. It gets very tedious at times."
Meena had never thought filling out Census forms would be a breeze, but this particular house in Uttam Nagar's D-Block was taking longer than he had imagined. This household would have challenged the most seasoned of enumerators -- and this was Meena's first time as an enumerator and just the day after Phase II of the Census, the Population Enumeration stage, kicked off across the country. This house has a "joint family", a large family that lives on two separate floors.
Meena has trouble grasping the complex web of relations in this family -- two sisters married to two brothers and their children, besides the family matriarch -- and he cannot decide whether they need to be recorded as one unit in the Census form or two separate units. After he painstakingly records their details for 30-odd minutes, one of the members of the family walks in to tell Meena that he had recorded her name wrong. "Komal is what they call me at home. My real name is Rachna," she says. Meena is momentarily flustered and says, "Aapko pehle batana chahiye tha."
He gets down to filling the form all over again and that's when the birth dates come up. The matriarch of the family joins the process and nobody can agree on the details. Meena spends around 20 minutes recording the exact birth dates. "The years of birth do not match the ages. We will have to calculate everyone's age properly," he tells them.
Meena turns to the matriarch. She was born in Maharashtra but cannot remember which year she moved to Delhi. "It was so long ago, who can keep track of these things? Why don't you just write 1972, it was around that time I think," she says.
It takes Meena over an hour recording the details here.
On Thursday, the day we caught up with Meena at 1.30 p.m in the afternoon, he had already put in a whole day's work at his school and was gearing up to spend the next five hours knocking on doors in Uttam Nagar. As he walks down a narrow lane in D-Block, he talks about a colleague who got mugged the day before while winding up her Census duties for the day.
Meena, who also worked on Phase 1 of the Census last year, will take home Rs 7,500 and 10 earned leaves for his work. He says the sense of duty is motivation enough. "During our training, they explained to us how important the Census is, how if we can zero down on different strata and groups of people, it will be easier for policymakers to reach them. It has to be done, and I like being one of the people involved in getting it done."
His first house for the afternoon is No 436. The doorbell is answered almost immediately and Meena is ushered into the house. In the tiny living room, the lady of the house is helpful -- her husband is a teacher too and away on Census duty, so she understands what is going on. Twenty minutes later, Meena is done recording the details of the four-member family and makes his way to the next house. "It is easier when families are small and have been living in Delhi for years, the number of questions become less then," he says.
At the next house, Meena rings the bell incessantly till a boy finally opens the door and says there are no adults at home. He calls up his father who tells Meena over the phone to come back later. "I think I will come back once I am done with the other houses on my list for today," Meena says.
At another house, the woman of the household cannot understand the nature of her son's job -- "kuch computer ka kaam karta hai." Meena suggests that she call her son to confirm. Turns out he is a senior executive at a technology firm, but is also studying to be a Chartered Accountant. Meena doesn't know whether to list the youth as a CA or a student and diligently records both.
Meena says he tries to cover 6-10 houses a day, and will have to work on Saturdays too. He has been given 20 days to cover 128 households. He's lucky if he can get home by 7.30 in the evening and spend some time with his children, aged two and four. "I try and wind up by 7 p.m. My children are too young to even notice that I am not home all day but my wife sometimes complains. In any case, this will all be over in another two weeks, and I can go back to being a school teacher again," he says.
Source: The Sunday Express
Meena's colleague at his school, A K Sinha, also an enumerator, joked about how an enumerator isn't always the person people want to see when they answer the doorbell. Worse, they get mistaken for salesmen. "If we are not dressed properly and not shaven, people wouldn't even let us in their homes, let alone give us a chair to sit on. Despite the awareness campaign, many people are hostile and cannot understand why we want to know when they were born and how long they have been living in a certain place. Landlords don't want us to survey tenants, housewives want to wait till husbands get home, and everybody has a problem remembering the exact year when members of their family are born. It gets very tedious at times."
Meena had never thought filling out Census forms would be a breeze, but this particular house in Uttam Nagar's D-Block was taking longer than he had imagined. This household would have challenged the most seasoned of enumerators -- and this was Meena's first time as an enumerator and just the day after Phase II of the Census, the Population Enumeration stage, kicked off across the country. This house has a "joint family", a large family that lives on two separate floors.
Meena has trouble grasping the complex web of relations in this family -- two sisters married to two brothers and their children, besides the family matriarch -- and he cannot decide whether they need to be recorded as one unit in the Census form or two separate units. After he painstakingly records their details for 30-odd minutes, one of the members of the family walks in to tell Meena that he had recorded her name wrong. "Komal is what they call me at home. My real name is Rachna," she says. Meena is momentarily flustered and says, "Aapko pehle batana chahiye tha."
He gets down to filling the form all over again and that's when the birth dates come up. The matriarch of the family joins the process and nobody can agree on the details. Meena spends around 20 minutes recording the exact birth dates. "The years of birth do not match the ages. We will have to calculate everyone's age properly," he tells them.
Meena turns to the matriarch. She was born in Maharashtra but cannot remember which year she moved to Delhi. "It was so long ago, who can keep track of these things? Why don't you just write 1972, it was around that time I think," she says.
It takes Meena over an hour recording the details here.
On Thursday, the day we caught up with Meena at 1.30 p.m in the afternoon, he had already put in a whole day's work at his school and was gearing up to spend the next five hours knocking on doors in Uttam Nagar. As he walks down a narrow lane in D-Block, he talks about a colleague who got mugged the day before while winding up her Census duties for the day.
Meena, who also worked on Phase 1 of the Census last year, will take home Rs 7,500 and 10 earned leaves for his work. He says the sense of duty is motivation enough. "During our training, they explained to us how important the Census is, how if we can zero down on different strata and groups of people, it will be easier for policymakers to reach them. It has to be done, and I like being one of the people involved in getting it done."
His first house for the afternoon is No 436. The doorbell is answered almost immediately and Meena is ushered into the house. In the tiny living room, the lady of the house is helpful -- her husband is a teacher too and away on Census duty, so she understands what is going on. Twenty minutes later, Meena is done recording the details of the four-member family and makes his way to the next house. "It is easier when families are small and have been living in Delhi for years, the number of questions become less then," he says.
At the next house, Meena rings the bell incessantly till a boy finally opens the door and says there are no adults at home. He calls up his father who tells Meena over the phone to come back later. "I think I will come back once I am done with the other houses on my list for today," Meena says.
At another house, the woman of the household cannot understand the nature of her son's job -- "kuch computer ka kaam karta hai." Meena suggests that she call her son to confirm. Turns out he is a senior executive at a technology firm, but is also studying to be a Chartered Accountant. Meena doesn't know whether to list the youth as a CA or a student and diligently records both.
Meena says he tries to cover 6-10 houses a day, and will have to work on Saturdays too. He has been given 20 days to cover 128 households. He's lucky if he can get home by 7.30 in the evening and spend some time with his children, aged two and four. "I try and wind up by 7 p.m. My children are too young to even notice that I am not home all day but my wife sometimes complains. In any case, this will all be over in another two weeks, and I can go back to being a school teacher again," he says.
Source: The Sunday Express