Tag: census

A Column, A Rebuttal, And What Are Census Towns Anyway?

The Efficient Market Hypothesis is alive and well, I am glad to report. At least when it comes to writing rebuttals. I will not get into the controversy at all in this post, but I do need to establish the context for what I will be writing about today.

Shamika Ravi wrote a column about what are, in her opinion, problematic national surveys in our country:

Using projected population estimates, we find that nearly all major surveys in India that were conducted post-2011 and used the Census 2011 for the sampling frame have overestimated the proportion of the rural population significantly. This is one of the several problems with data quality, but it is a critical concern — and appropriately highlights the problem at hand.

https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/shamika-ravi-writes-our-national-surveys-are-based-on-faulty-sampling-8799300/

I am but one of many who happen to disagree with many of the points raised in this column. But that’s not what I want to write about in today’s post. Pronab Sen wrote a column in response, and this post is about a particular point in his column. But first, a key excerpt from Sen’s column:

The Census measures urban population in two categories — (a) statutory towns/cities; and (b) Census towns. Statutory towns/cities are entities which are legally recognised as urban areas by the concerned state governments and are governed by municipalities/nagar palikas. Census towns, on the other hand, are legally rural areas, that is, coming under panchayats, which exhibit characteristics of urban agglomerates on three counts — size of the population, population density and proportion of the male workforce not engaged in agriculture. It so happens that in Census 2011, a major part of the rapid urbanisation that Ravi talks about occurred in Census towns and not in the statutory urban areas.
The surveys, on the other hand, follow only the statutory definition while classifying rural and urban areas. Thus, although all surveys use the Census as the sampling frame, Census towns are treated as a part of the rural sector and are included in the rural sample. Therefore, practically all the discrepancy that Ravi makes so much of is simply the outcome of differences in the definition of urban areas in the Census and the surveys.

https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/criticism-of-sample-surveys-is-misplaced-their-data-differ-from-census-count-because-definitions-are-different-8822347/

Read both essays in their entirety to get a sense of what the debate is about, but for the purpose of today’s post let’s focus on census towns. As Pronab Sen mentions, census towns are “legally rural areas” – but they “exhibit characteristics of urban agglomerates”. What characteristics? Three, per Sen: size of the population, population density and proportion of the male workforce not engaged in agriculture.

Well ok, you might say, but what values do these variables need to have for an urban agglomeration to be considered a “census town”?

The Census definition identifies urban settlements as either areas already governed by ULBs or areas having a population greater than 5,000, a density over 400 people per square kilometre, and 75% of the male working population employed in non-agricultural activities. By this definition, India is 31% urban.
Areas that satisfy these criteria but are not already governed by ULBs are known as Census Towns (CTs).

https://www.idfcinstitute.org/site/assets/files/15116/reforming_urban_india_idfc_institute.pdf

When was this definition framed? In, er, 1961. And nope, it hasn’t been updated since. But defining what is an “urban agglomeration” and what isn’t is quite tricky. Consider this chart, for example:

https://www.livemint.com/Politics/4UjtdRPRikhpo8vAE0V4hK/How-much-of-India-is-actually-urban.html

As the article from which I sourced this chart says, “while experts may disagree on the precise definition of ‘urban’, they all agree that it makes sense to view the entire spectrum of settlements—from small villages to large urban agglomerations—as a continuum rather than in terms of the rural/urban binary”

And by the way, the same definition of urban agglomeration will apply to the 2021 Census. In, in fact, you read the PDF, all rural units having a population of 4000 or more at the preceding census (2011) will be examined, as they will almost certainly have crossed the 5000 mark in 2021. This, of course, is the point that Pronab Sen is making in his report. Since these will likely be the best performing parts of hitherto “rural” India, classifying them as urban here on in will make rural India look far worse.

OK, but why does all of this matter all that much, eh? Census towns, in particular – what’s the big deal? Well, here’s why it matters:

Census Towns continue to be governed by panchayats despite having the density of urban areas. Rural Local Bodies (RLBs) and ULBs were designed to cater to the varying governance needs of rural and urban areas. The 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendment Acts specify different powers and functions for the
two bodies. For instance, as seen in Figure 2, ULBs are mandated to provide water for residential, industrial, and commercial purposes, while RLBs are mandated to provide only safe drinking water. This means that industrial or commercial units in de facto urban areas may find it harder to access adequate water compared to those in areas governed by ULBs. Panchayats are not required to provide many of the other basic services required of dense urban living, for example, sewerage lines, fire services, and building code regulations. Therefore Census Towns remain grossly underserved. As of the 2011 Census, 55 million people – the population of South Africa – lived in them.

https://www.idfcinstitute.org/site/assets/files/15116/reforming_urban_india_idfc_institute.pdf (pg. 14)

Here’s Fig.2 from that same report:

Defining urbanization is a tricky endeavor at the best of times in any country. Doing so for India comes with its own unique set of challenges. But when the definition may have an impact on the answer to the question of how well India has done in the recent past, well, that’s a whole other problem, and it’s not only restricted to economics.

But hey, now you know what a census town is. There’s that.

Thinking Aloud About Uttar Pradesh

Until very recently, I used to teach a course called Contemporary India. The program in which I used to teach this course is suspended temporarily, for it was designed for American students who would spend a semester studying in India.

One of my favorite classes in that course was about India’s demographics. It was one of my favorite classes because I got to show three slides in it. These slides were nothing but screen-grabs from an excellent feature that the Economist magazine had published a while back. Note that the content requires Flash, and it therefore probably will not work in our modern browsers. But the slides I speak of are presented below.

The first of these shows each state in India mapped to the country that is closest to it in terms of economic output:

The second shows each state as mapped to the country that is closest to it in terms of economic output per capita:

And finally, we have the third chart: each state in India being represented as a country that is closest to it in terms of population:

Each chart is worth more than a few minutes of your time. Note how Maharashtra is like Singapore, Sri Lanka and Mexico respectively, for example, when you make comparisons in terms of economic output, economic output per capita and population respectively.

My favorite thing to point out, especially to my American students, used to be how all of Canada’s population could fit inside Kerala. India is truly a mind boggling country!

But, Uttar Pradesh. That is what we’re going to talk about today. This is a mind boggling country (not a typo. It really is a country. If it were a country, it would be the fifth most populous country in the world. Yes, really).

It has, as this article points out, about 10 percent of India’s districts. One out of every seven Lok Sabha MP’s comes from this state. One out of every six Indian is from the state of Uttar Pradesh. Yogi Adityanath is the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, but he is responsible for the same number of people as Imran Khan or Jair Bolsonaro. It, to put it mildly, is a truly large state.

And the article that I linked to in the paragraph above makes a point that is worth thinking about: is it too big?

Shekhar Gupta recommends carving up the state into five separate states, and before you scoff at the idea, consider the facts once again: should one chief minister be responsible for the governance of the fifth most populous country in the world?

And the problem isn’t just about population, it is also about national level politics. Or rather, about a problem that nobody wants to think about with any level of urgency.

Here’s the problem: how many people should a Member of Parliament in the Lok Sabha represent? Ideally, it ought to be India’s population divided by the number of elected representatives in the Lok Sabha. But obviously, in a country of India’s size and complexity, that isn’t always possible.

Here’s Ajit Ranade from two years ago, writing in the Livemint:

We may desire “equality” of constituencies, but economic development and demographic patterns do not develop uniformly across the country. Some states have achieved zero population growth while others still have very high fertility rates. This pattern too has a north-south dimension. It is as if the economic centre of gravity is shifting south and the political centre of gravity is shifting north.

Here is what he means by that: in the year 1976, we passed a law that effectively froze the number of seats in India’s Lok Sabha, per state. That number was frozen on the basis of the 1971 census. And from 1976 until the year 2000, we decided to not do anything about it.

And then, in the year 2000, we made the problem worse. Here’s Ajit Ranade again:

In 2000, another amendment postponed the day of reckoning to 2026. Thus, only after 2026 will we consider changing the number of seats in Parliament. Till then, everything is frozen as per the 1971 census. Remember, in 1971, India’s population was 548 million, and by 2031, the first census after 2026, it may well be close to 1.4 billion. The great apprehension is that redrawing boundaries and distributing the existing 550 MPs might mean that the south will lose a lot of seats to the north. Even if more members are added to the Lok Sabha, that incremental gain will mostly go to the northern states.

https://www.livemint.com/Opinion/7unVzUcfBJxbHHaiRpenmK/India-should-begin-discussing-the-delimitation-question.html

It is not just the fact that Uttar Pradesh is too big from an administrative viewpoint, and that it contains too many people for it to be administered as one state in a country. It is not just the fact that it is far too important a state in the political calculus of India.

It is the fact that it is about to get a lot bigger, a lot more complex, and a whole lot more important in about five years from now. Why do I say that, you ask? Well, for all of the reasons above, but also for the chart below:

Here’s Shekhar Gupta, from the article I referred to earlier:

Twenty crore people, divided over 75 districts spread over 2,43,000 sq km, is too much to govern for one government, especially when run entirely by one individual, which is the norm in our states now. Similarly, 80 seats in the Lok Sabha is too much power for one state in a federal republic. It is more than Gujarat, Rajasthan and Karnataka put together. It is politically distortionary. Especially when UP’s politics is so internally divisive based on caste and religion that the incentive for improving social indicators is poor.

https://theprint.in/national-interest/uttar-pradesh-is-indias-broken-heartland-break-it-into-4-or-5-states/458552/

When you think about that excerpt, and think about the point Ajit Ranade makes in his article two years ago, you realize that we need to start talking – soon, and a lot – about what is to be done about Uttar Pradesh.

I would love to read more about this. If any of you reading this have reading material to share, I would be very grateful indeed. Thank you.

ROW: Links for 17th July, 2019

  1. “A politically divisive debate continues to rage over U.S. President Donald Trump’s push to add a citizenship or nationality question to the U.S. census.That same question has been part of Canada’s long-form census for over a century without a ripple, although it’s not part of the short-form questionnaire.”
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    Via MR, an article that helps you learn that the citizenship question has been around for a while now.
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  2. “Not asking about citizenship seems to signify an attitude toward immigrants something like this: Get them in and across the border, their status may be mixed and their existence may be furtive, and let’s not talk too openly about what is going on, and later we will try to get all of them citizenship. Given the current disagreement between the two parties on immigration questions, that may well be the only way of getting more immigrants into the U.S., which I hold to be a desirable goal. But that is a dangerous choice of political turf, and it may not help the pro-immigration cause in the longer run.”
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    And here’s why Tyler Cowen linked to the piece we added above in the first place.
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  3. “The Indian Rupee will now be accepted for transaction at all airports in Dubai, according to a leading newspaper in the United Arab Emirates.The acceptance of Indian currency is good news for tourists from that country as earlier they lost a sizeable amount due to exchange rates, sources said.”
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    On the growing importance of India in the global scheme of things…
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  4. “By demanding that schools provide opportunities for young girls to play sports and mandating that universities provide equal scholarship funding for women, title IX created opportunity and incentive for girls to play sports. Suddenly, not only were energetic, athletic girls given the same opportunities to play as the boys were, but they also had the opportunity for their sporting talent to fund their educations through scholarships.”
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    Policies, politics, Title IX and the recently concluded World Cup.
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  5. “Yan said the data shows that housing prices have “decoupled” from income, and are instead driven by access to capital – giving investors a clear advantage over average Canadians. “It’s not about supply or demand any more,” said Yan. “It’s: who are we building for?””
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    Circling back to Canada, this time about housing and its excesses. This has a familiar ring to it…