India’s decennial census has finally arrived, 15 years late, but with an update: The paper sheets, hand-drawn boundary maps are now being replaced with geotagging features integrated with smartphones to get precise coordinates of each household, each cluster. Professor Nithiyanandam of the Takshashila Institution, a geospatial programming specialist, calls it “a gold mine of information.”
The concept is still pretty much the same if you see it. An enumerator, that is a person employed in taking a census of the population, will visit your house and ask you around 29 questions per household. These will span across your assets, connectivity, income, and housing , but the difference is that they will have a spatial tag attached.
Nithiyanandam says, “This data can be transmitted real time to somewhere where people can monitor. It can tell you how the census is going in which part of and what is the target and how much data has been collected so far.”
He further adds, “As the information is collected with a spatial tag (i.e. ideally the latitude and longitude) or through DigiPin, thereafter it is easy to store the data. The data then goes to a geospatial database, where all the information is stored.”
Imagine that during a fire or a flood, you can access the area not only through google maps being in addition to it, you can tap to know the major type of buildings that exist in a particular house block, how many people are living in that particular road or lane, etc. Hence, geospatial tagging allows the government to reach you in a crisis when you have no access to cellphones or network and can help in decision making.
However, for this system to work, the enumerators need to collect this data. To reduce the reliance on them, a ‘self-enumeration’ window has been opened for a limited time period wherein a head of the family can voluntarily come forward and provide all the census data that is asked. This leaves physical enumerators with the responsibility of only verification of the data provided by you.
Nithiyanandam also adds that if services like DigiPin, a 10-digit-code that gives a more accurate location than just a pin code or latitute/longitude are utilised in the census, it may bring more accuracy in data collection. Watch the whole conversation on StratNewsGlobal Tech.
