The history of census in India dates back in 1872 when it used to conduct in non-synchronous way. With a history of more than 130 years, this massive exercise has been bringing out a reliable wealth of statistics every 10 years without fail. He informed that the questions on disability were asked when the census started until 1931. It was after independence that question on disability was dropped as the statistics had the direct influence on the resource allocation.
Meeting with Sightsavers Team at Mumbai
Inclusion of Disability in Census 2001
Mr Abidi shared his experience of including disability in census 2001. In 1995 passing of PWD Act led to the movement of collecting numbers for appropriate allocation of funds through the government. In 1999, Mr Abidi wrote a letter to the then commissioner of census to include question on disability. The reply came ironically around December during International Day for Persons with Disability that "we are happy to share with you that the question on disability will not be included in census 2001".
This was enough to ignite the movement at national level with more passion across the country. This was followed by six months of pitched battle through press conferences, press meets, dharnas, rallies etc. under the flagship of NCPEDP. Mr Abidi lamented that it took 6 months for the country to be convinced for a question on disability. At last, question was included in census 2001 with four categories and results showed 2.1% of Indian population had disability.
"The official figure for the disabled population of India is 1.9% (Source: NSSO Survey 1991) ! If we compare it with percentage of people with disabilities in other Asian Countries - China 5%, Pakistan 4.9%, Phillipines 4.4%, Nepal 5.0%, we can either pat our backs for literally having eradicated disability out of India or we can pinch ourselves in order to wake up and face the real truth. "
Progress So Far for Census 2011
The coming census will be one of its kind in the world enumerating 1.2 billion population of India, engaging 2.5 million people to carry out this massive excercise to create a biometric national database. In this census, every person aged over 15 years will be photographed and fingerprinted to create the database.
To further fine tune the disability count in the commencing census , this year NCPEDP organized a roundtable consultation in New Delhi on 5th and 6th March in presence of Dr. C Chandramouli, the Registrar and Census Commissioner of India. From Sightsavers, Mr Ketan Kothari (Programme Officer, South India Area) participated in the consultation. In this consultation, the group constituting the representative of disability sector were suggested to draft appropriate questions on disability to be included in the census questionnaire by Dr Chandramouli. It was in this meeting, NCPEDP was asked to prepare training material in the form of guide book and to participate in the training of enumerators. About 100 persons from 21 states participated in the meeting.
Mr Abidi further shared with the group that, they are planning to organize phase wise training for train enumerators at all the levels starting from 90 national trainers (master trainers) who will train 270 zonal trainers. He insisted that order of question to be asked should also be changed as in last census, the disability question was at number 15. To improve the data collection, the responsibility lies with the disabled person and their family members also. To address this an awareness campaign will be launched to sensitize people before census.The meeting concluded with high hopes of getting the numbers right.
Ms Elizabeth Kurian- Regional Director (Sightsavers) falicitating Mr Javed Abidi with book on the life of Sightsavers founder Sir John Wilson.
*Photo courtesy: Bhavana Pande
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