Census workers strive to set records straight

AGARTALA, February 8: The sixth Census in Tripura is slated to begin from tomorrow. Authorities have identified a "peculiar tendency" among people in filing incorrect replies to queries on age. Apart from the need to enrol in the voters' list, people have a "general tendency to furnish wrong information about age to square off age limits on round figures". Pointing out this tendency in "single year age returns" (determining the number of people in a particular age group in a year) of the 1991 census, director, census operation, Krishnadhan Nath, said, "In the enumeration of the 1991 Census, the number of people aged 17 were found to be only 37,917 but this shot up to 76,342 when the count for 18-year-olds was taken. "In our view, many of those enumerated gave wrong age figures to get registered as voters," Nath told newspersons. Besides, the peculiar tendency to file returns about age in round figures was also revealed by the census. The fact that in 1991 only 31,617 people were found to be in the age group of 19 and 76,917 people claimed to be 20-year-old highlights the trend. Similarly, as against 14,511 people in the age group of 29, a whopping 10,37,68 returned the figure of 30 as their age. "This has caught our attention and this time we have directed enumerators to insist on correct age returns from people as part of the census operations," Nath said. The director of the census, who addressed a Press conference, at the state secretariat today, said altogether 7,500 census enumerators and supervisors start work tomorrow and the exercise would be completed on February 28. On the last day, the migrants and floating population would be taken into account. Nath said for complete information "enumerators would ask 24 specific questions and record replies." Special attention would be paid to counting of the "physically-handicapped and mentally retarded people" because there was a tendency among a section of people to conceal information on this sensitive issue, he added. Regarding the difficulty in conducting census operations in the hilly interior areas ravaged by extremism, Nath said the state government has made special security arrangements to help census enumerators visit the areas.