Due to Covid, India’s census count is overdue by five years. But they’re getting things going, which involves hiring 3 million people to count around one and a half billion. For Bloomberg, Satviki Sanjay describes the challenge.
The first order of business was to find enough people — more than 3 million — to knock on every door in the country. Teachers and low-level bureaucrats were ordered to participate and offered 25,000 rupees ($262) for a task that will likely take several weeks. “We knew we’d have census duty, but I had no idea what exactly that might entail,” says Priyanka Yadav, a 35-year-old primary school teacher from Gorakhpur, a district of about 4 million (she’ll be able to give you a more precise figure next year) 13 hours east of Delhi by train.
In contrast, the U.S. Census Bureau hired about 500,000 workers for the decennial count.
Visualize This: The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics (2nd Edition)
