Kamal Ghorui
Pulling teachers away from teaching can’t mend India’s data poverty. A specialised enumeration service is needed
Actions speak louder than words. India says teachers are the essential engine of its future, who must forge a citizenry that can thrive in an AI era.
But then acts like teaching is utterly nonessential. Today, they are going door-to-door, houselisting for Census 2027. EC’s SIR exercise has demanded their labour. They get election duties. They have to register beneficiaries for govt health insurance schemes, conduct cattle censuses, survey drug-addiction… against the backdrop of 10L teaching vacancies in the schools funded by Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan.
Even private school staff are being put on census shifts, under threat of salary cuts. Clearly, browbeating teachers is quite ‘convenient’ for governments. But their convenience is very costly for the rest of us.
Every day a teacher does census work, means
1) an education deficit. Since they are not robots, making them sweat in the field during their vacations and after-school hours, doesn’t lessen this toll. The variety of data the country needs, means
2) these disruptions are frequent, not one-off. But
3) data quality cannot be good when the enumerators are resentful and unspecialised. So, what we have here is an ad hoc system with no real upside to it. It’s past time we considered rational, efficient alternatives. US, for example, has been running a census bureau with around 4,000 full-time staff, who swell up during decennial counts. Professional enumerators improve data accuracy and consistency across census cycles. All the public data needs they serve year-round, also make them quite cost-effective.
Doesn’t an Indian Enumeration Service (IEnS), ring nicely? It could have different tiers, including a permanent cadre both at the centre and in state-level coordination units. And on a need basis, instead of pulling 30L teachers away from teaching, it could mobilise from a 4cr-strong pool of higher education students. This would be a valuable experience for young Indians.
Right now, teachers are out in the sun, pounding on their personal, sometimes newly bought, smartphones, out of sorts with the housing listing app, the weather, and the government.
Now, imagine motivated, tech-savvy university students doing the legwork instead. It wouldn’t even need to be done in the summer (when teachers are ‘freer’) anymore. And imagine the riches of data, accurate, timely, accessible.
With welfare to transport, the productivity gains would improve all our lives.
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