Look, schoolkids are carrying out census exercise

The 2011 Census, India’s most crucial data collection exercise, is being conducted by untrained schoolchildren and collegians in some parts of the city.

Some supervisors and enumerators, appointed by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) to conduct the exercise, have roped in children as “dummies” to do the hard work.

On Monday, the BMC initiated an inquiry into one such case at the LIC Colony in Borivli.

Students, who have just finished their standard X exams, were found administering the census questionnaire in some residential pockets inside the colony.

One of them told DNA that they were being paid Rs3 per form. On further prodding, he revealed that nine of his friends (of the same age) were put on a similar task.

Their employers — three students from a Dahisar college — were unofficially filling in as substitutes for enumerators, who remained absent.

The school students interviewed families, while their slightly more trained college-going employers issued receipts on behalf of the enumerator. Understandably, the young hands made mistakes while administering the questionnaire in original.

Between themselves, the collegians were entrusted the task of completing six housing blocks, each comprising 150-odd houses.

“Our senior supervisors, appointed by the BMC for the census drive, assigned us the task. They knew that school-going children had been appointed,” one of them said.

The collegian added that he was in the know of other cases where untrained children were similarly roped in as dummies.

The supervisors (names withheld), however, feigned ignorance.

“We had no idea that college students, who were appointed as they had been a part of BMC’s polio surveillance programmes, would further outsource work to minors,” one of them said.

Dr Varsha Puri, medical officer (health), who is in charge of the census exercise in the ward, however, said that she was not informed about this. Her senior, Dr Guirish Ambe, executive health officer, BMC, further said that such recruitments were in no form authorised.

Manisha Patankar-Mhaiskar, additional principal census officer, said that the matter will be thoroughly investigated.

She, however, insisted that, “Such incidents, if at all true, were stray incidents. They were not prevalent on a large scale.” Even as Mhaiskar has ordered a probe in the matter, there are cover-up efforts at the ward level, according to sources.