Kolkata: Nearly one in four households in Bengal has already completed the first digital step of Census 2027, giving the state the country’s highest self-enumeration tally as around 1.8 lakh enumerators fanned out across urban and rural areas from Sunday to begin the crucial door-to-door phase.The 30-day Houselisting and Housing Census, which began on Aug 16 and will continue till Sept 14, will cover every household — including those that have already submitted their details online. Enumerators will verify self-enumeration entries and collect data from households that did not use the online facility.According to the state, 53,13,589 households had completed self-enumeration by the time the 15-day window closed on Saturday. Of these, around 93.8% of households that had started the process completed it, officials said.“We are ranked first in India in terms of the self-enumeration process. So far, the highest number has been recorded in our state, with 53,13,589 households completing the process. Our completion rate is 93.8%,” CM Suvendu Adhikari said on Sunday.With Bengal estimated to have around two crore households, the completed self-enumerations account for roughly 25% of the state’s households. Malda and North 24 Parganas emerged as the best-performing districts, according to the state govt statement.The field exercise began on Sunday despite heavy rain in several parts of the state, with enumerators visiting homes to verify online submissions and bring households that skipped self-enumeration into the Census database. Around 30,000 supervisors have also been deployed to monitor the exercise.Most of the enumerators and supervisors are schoolteachers and other govt employees drafted for Census duty. Each enumerator has been assigned around 150-200 households. DMs in rural areas and municipal commissioners in urban local bodies have been designated as principal Census officers.The exercise is the first phase of Census 2027, with the population enumeration scheduled to begin in Feb next year. The current phase will record details of housing conditions, household amenities, assets and other characteristics through the questionnaire. Data will be captured digitally through a mobile application, with offline collection facilities available where required.For enumerators, however, the first day threw up a different set of challenges — ranging from difficulty locating addresses to inadequate training and public awareness.An enumerator in New Town, who had earlier worked on the SIR exercise as a BLO, said the area allotted to him was far from both his home and workplace. Another enumerator in Dum Dum said the assignment was proving more difficult than SIR duty. There were many others, who however had a seamless first day and went around alleys and lanes in Kolkata and rest of the state marking households with acronyms “CN” (that stand for census number) and happily posting the images on social media. Officials said the door-to-door process is designed to ensure that the digital self-enumeration exercise does not leave out households that could not or chose not to use the online system. “(Inputs from Suman Chakraborti)
