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Article: LIES, DAMN LIES & STATISTICS : How India's census takers count.(Brief Article)
- Article from:
- Commonweal
- Article date:
- August 17, 2001
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2001 Commonweal Foundation. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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India's census, a once-a-decade undertaking, is a massive, door-to-door exercise because widespread illiteracy makes a mail-in form impractical. Conducted in February by enumerators culled from government schools, it was especially interesting to me because, after enormous effort, disability activists such as myself (I head a school for children with special needs) had succeeded in persuading the government to include handicapped people for the first time. While the census question was unsatisfactorily framed (only one disability was allowed per person; a child like my daughter, who falls into three of the given categories, had to be slotted into the one which we believed ...