Bhubaneswar, Sept. 12: The socio-economic caste census that was undertaken in Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation (BMC) area over three months ago is expected to be completed by the end of this month.
The BMC had started the work on June 1 after completing the basic groundwork, including training of enumerators. On June 22, the secretary of state housing and urban development department had written a letter to the BMC commissioner to expedite the process of enumeration and complete it by June 30. However, the corporation missed the deadline.
The letter also stated that the overall performance of the state on the census front got affected because of the slow progress of enumeration work in BMC areas.
“I recently reviewed the progress of the census and it is likely to be completed by the end of September,” said BMC deputy commissioner Krushna Prasad Pati.
The Union government is conducting the exercise to list households on the basis of their socio-economic status, which will enable the state government to prepare a list of families living below the poverty line. That would lead to better targeting of government schemes to the right beneficiaries while ensuring that illegal beneficiaries are excluded.
Enumeration will help in generating and authenticate information of caste wise-population along with socio-economic condition, education status of various castes and sections of the population.
The Union government had last conducted an exercise to identify people living below poverty line in 2002. Sources in BMC said that the corporation area was divided into seven zones for the census. BMC had the highest number of enumeration blocks among the 103 urban local bodies of the state.
The civic body has completed enumeration in 1,180 of the total 1,960 enumeration blocks. An enumeration block is the basic enumeration unit consisting of 125 to 150 households with population varying from 650 to 800.
It deploys as many as 539 enumerators including teachers, BMC officials and other government employees for this purpose.
The corporation was provided with 630 hand-held electronic devices (tablet PCs) for making necessary entries and reducing the margin of error. As per guidelines, each enumerator will be provided with one data entry operator to record the data.
