Public exams to delay 'Census 2021' in Telangana

Hyderabad: India's biggest exercise of household survey – 'Census 2021' will be delayed in Telangana. Even as the country is getting ready for the Census from April 1 this year, Telangana will go slow as the State is set to conduct series of public examinations mainly the 10th class and other high school standard examinations in the same month.

About 80 per cent of the enumerators in the conduct of the census are from the teaching staff of the government schools. Officials said that most of the teaching staff is busy in conducting the ongoing pre-final examinations in their respective schools and they will be preoccupied with public exams from March third week to mid-April.

Some of the teachers already underwent the training as enumerators and many of them could not take out time due to preoccupation with examination related activity in the primary, upper primary and high schools.

The trained Revenue staff are only ready to take up the survey but they are miniscule in the numbers. Top officials said that ' the census in a full fledge manner will not be taken up unless the teachers are free from their academic work.

All the staff in the school education department who were roped for the survey will be freed only after the completion of the examinations in the April end or May first week.

Until then, the survey will be taken up only on a sample basis with the available revenue staff in the identified districts. From May onwards, the census exercise will be taken up on a full scale.

Since the Centre set September as deadline to complete the survey, officials said that the State government will seek one month extension in lieu of the one month delay for the whole exercise.

Officials said that all the required technical mechanism including the Tabs for paperless documentation and the updation of the applications and data gathered from the citizens was already made available.

The union government is already developing a mobile application for people to upload the details of properties.

In the first phase, the enumerators will take up house listing mainly identifying buildings and structures and in the second phase, the population enumeration will be carried out.