Essay on the History of Population Census in India

Data on population became available on a regular basis in India only after the establishment of the system of decennial census in 1872. The beginning of census taking may therefore be considered as the starting point of population studies in India.

Many of the earlier census reports have a heavy anthropological slant, for they were written by British administrators who were interested in getting a broad understanding of the unknown strange land they had colonised and the equally unknown strange people whose culture was totally different from their own.

These administrators and scholars made a tremendous contribution to the development of population studies in India.

The British census actuaries contributed much by studying the Indian age data and by constructing life tables based on the census data his is a contribution not only to the development of population studies but also to the discipline of mathematics.

Based on census reports from 1872 to 1941, Kingsley Davis, the well-known demographer, produced his monumental work The Population of India and Pakistan, which is valued even today for its contribution to the progress of population studies in India.

The Imperial Gazetteers

While training the development of population studies in India, it will not be out of place to mention the Imperial Gazetteers, which contain a thorough and exhaustive account of India and her people. The Imperial Gazetteers were first published in nine volumes in 1881 at the initiative of W.W. Hunter.

A companion volume appeared in 1882 and was entitled The Indian Empire. Its History, People and Products. Later, revised versions of the Imperial Gazetteers were issued in 1907 and 1909 in 26 volumes.

The first volume of the Imperial Gazetteers, in the section on Public Health and Vital Statistics, contains a discussion on such matters as nutrition, early marriages birth rates, the relationship between marriage customs and birth rates, rural-urban birth and death rates, differentials in mortality, by sex, religion, rural-urban residence, infant mortality, causes of death, health conditions in the European and the native army, etc. It is interesting to note, as one looks back that these are precisely the topics which are today included in population studies.

The Role of the Indian Intelligent

While voluminous scholarly census reports and Imperial Gazetteers were being prepared by foreign administrators, even if only for their own use, the Indian intelligentsia did not show any interest in the study of population till the late 1930.

One reason for this lack of interest was that the rate of population growth was not very high at that time and did not cause any serious concern. The other reason was the nation’s preoccupation with the struggle for independence.

P.K. Wattal may be considered as the pioneer in trying to focus the attention of Indian leaders and thinkers on the population problem in India, when he wrote about it in 1916.

His pleas however, went unheeded, for Indian leaders and thinkers were more concerned about political, social and educational problems than about the population problem.

Both the press and the public were inclined to treat it more or less as a joke. In 1933, Wattal brought out a new edition of his work, Population Problem in India, incorporating the results of the 1931 census of India.

In the late 1930s, some interest in the study of the population of India was generated and the First Indian Population Conference was held in 1936 under the auspices of the University of Lucknow, at which a paper on the Future Growth of India’s Population was presented and the need for birth control was discussed.

The Second All-India Conference on Population and the First Family Hygiene Conference were jointly held in Bombay in 1938. Apart from discussing the social and medical aspects of birth control and human sexuality several other subjects related to population studies were covered.

These included differential fertility, maternity and child welfare, infant mortality, housing and health, nutrition, morbidity, vital statistics, logistic law of growth of the Indian population, economic problems associated with population size and growth, such as population and unemployment, poverty and population, optimum theory of population, sociological analysis and forecast of population growth.

This long list indicates the interest of Indian scholars in various aspects of the study of population and highlights their multi-disciplinary approach to this study.

Prior to independence, however, the outstanding students of population were the economists, and discussions on Indian population centred mainly around the question of whether or not India was over-populated. Moreover, authors during this period largely concentrated on relating India’s population to the nation’s economic condition.

When Enid Charles in Twilight of Parenthood (1936) asserted that the population of India was slowly increasing, an interesting controversy was generated between Dr. K.C.K.E. Raja, a public health worker, and Professor Adarkar, an economist.

Dr. Raja was of the opinion that Enid Charles was underestimating the trend of future population growth in India and that the rate of growth in India would be higher in 1931-41 than in the previous decade.

Professor Adarkar, on the other hand, maintained that Dr. Raja was rather anxious to support the view of the Public Health Commissioner, expressed in the official report of 1931, that the “Indian population was growing at an alarmingly rapid rate” while the weight of evidence then was heavily in favour of future stability and decline in the population of India.

The forecast that the Indian population would reach the 400- million mark by 1941 provoked Dr. Radhakamal Mukerjee to write on Food Planning for Four Hundred Million (1938).

While emphasising the need for agricultural development, Dr. Mukerjee also took many other relevant points into account. His book was followed by the publication of India’s Teeming Millions (1939) by Professor Gyan Chand, in which the population problem was viewed from the economic point of view.

A significant development in the population field took place in 1938 when the Indian National Congress set up a sub-committee of the National Planning Committee under the chairmanship of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru to study the problem from the points of view of food supply, nutrition, social reform, unemployment and social welfare.

Government’s Concern of India

The Government of India, realising the importance of population data, set up a Population Data Committee in 1944 under the chairmanship of W.M. Yeats with Sir Theodore Gregory, Professor P.C. Mahalanobis, Professor K.B. Madhava and Dr. K.C.K.E. Raja as its members.

This committee paid special attention to the statistical problems arising out of the tabulation of the 1941 census data and recommended the use of sampling methods for the estimation of vital statistics.

In 1946, the Government of India appointed the Health Survey and Development Committee (popularly known as the Bhore Committee) to study health conditions in India and to make recommendations for their improvement.

This committee made a thorough study of the activities in the field of population and recommended the appointment of a Registrar-General of Vital and Population Statistics.

One of the important recommendations of this committee was that “the population problem should be the subject of continuous study.”

Field Enquiries of the Indian Statistical Institute

Professor P.C. Mahalanobis and the Indian Statistical Institute had by this time started taking a keen interest in population research. As early as 1937, the Indian Statistical Institute collected data on fertility through field enquiries.

About 1945, the All-India Institute of Hygiene and Public Health, Calcutta, initiated several studies under the guidance of Dr. C. Chandrasekharan.

An important field study undertaken by this Institute was the study of the reproductive patterns of 8,000 women selected from the city of Calcutta and the surrounding rural areas.

This study attempted to analyse the effects of socio-economic conditions on reproductive patterns. The Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, Pune, was another Institute which took interest in population studies.

In 1942, Professor N.V. Sovani of this Institute published a study entitled The Population Problem in India: A Regional Approach.