It is easy to treat the Census delay as a bureaucratic footnote, another exercise pushed back and eventually completed. But every year it slips, the projected population figures that welfare schemes, infrastructure planning and even parliamentary seat allocation still rely on drift further from reality.
Migration patterns alone have shifted enough in the intervening years that district-level projections in several states are now demonstrably out of step with ration card registrations and school enrolment data.
The house-listing phase beginning in October is welcome, but the real test will be whether the data reaches planners fast enough to matter, rather than becoming, once again, a historical record of where the country used to be.
