Bhubaneswar: June 06: Preparations for Census of India-2021, the largest administrative exercise of the world have been put on the table. A high level meeting to this effect was held under the Chairmanship of Chief Secretary Aditya Prasad Padhi in secretariat conference hall on Friday afternoon wherein Principal Secretary Revenue & Disaster Management Nikunja Bihari Dhal outlined the issues and Joint Director Census, Government of India Pravakar Barad presented the proposal for discussion. Looking into different dimensions of the proposal, Chief Secretary Padhi directed to make the whole census operation complete and accurate. Padhi emphasized on complete coverage of all houses and accurate enumeration of all the people.
It was decided in the meeting that this time one specially designed mobile app will be adopted for enumeration to make it more accurate and real time. Tahasildars were asked to update and certify the maps of the villages in their respect of their Tahasils. It was also decided that the District Magistrates would function as Principal Census Officers and the Additional District Magistrates would be designated as District Census Officer in their respective districts. The Census would be carried on in two phases. In 1st phase there would be house listing & housing census and in 2nd phase there would be population enumeration. It was decided to complete both the phases tentatively by March, 2021. Unlike previous Censuses, this time Tahasil wise enumeration would be done instead of police station wise enumeration.
Further, the meeting decided that pre-testing activities of the Census techniques would be conducted in three representative places of the State. These are Pattamundai in Kendrapara district, Puintala in Bolangir district and Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation. Joint Director Barad said that the pretesting would be done through mobile app. It would start from 12th August, 2019 and would be completed by 30th September, 2019 within which the whole census operation would be done on sampling basis using both the mobile app and paper mode.
Additional Chief Secretary and Development Commissioner Asit Kumar Tripathy, Principal Secretaries N.B.Dhal, Bishnupada Sethi, G. Mathivathanan, State Nodal Officer Sailendra Dwibedi along with senior officers from concerned departments participated in deliberations.
