Census Deprivation

“About 2.5 million census-takers began traveling across more than 630,000 villages and 5,000 cities in an effort to visit every structure serving as a home, from tin shanties to skyscrapers, in what the government calls the world's largest administrative exercise.” April 1^st New York Times. A massive effort with the stated intention of fingerprinting and photographing every resident over the age of 15, resulting in an identity card being issued to everyone able to carry one. Questions are drilling down on issues like Internet and mobile phone usage, and more intimate details involving the availability of toilets and whether or not the drinking water is potable. The cost of this census, the broadest ever taken, is estimated to be about $1.2 billion, but the results could reshape the nation’s future in huge ways.

Why aren’t Americans protesting in the streets over what is clearly a tradition-buster – mandatory identity cards? Is this a method to control illegal immigration or something bigger? I think the answer is more basic than that. The country in question is not the United States; it is India, a nation with an estimated 1.2 billion people. The world’s largest democracy, India is also one of the most polarized economic systems on earth, with the vast majority of its population on the lower, even the lowest, economic rungs of society, yet sporting an upper and middle class with a total aggregation so as to exceed the entire population of the United States.

Picture census workers tracking down the vast hordes of homeless people, millions who sleep in doorways, on railroad platforms or even under parked cars. But change for the millions of uncounted is a strong wind blowing. On April 1^st, a new compulsory education law kicked in India in to provide that essential ingredient to improve the quality of life for “impoverished children who have been denied school admission because of a lack of documents such as birth certificates.” The Times. That little identity card will open many doors that were previously slammed shut.

I know how completely absurd the system was, providing a “free education” that no one in the poorest segment of society could ever afford. Years ago, I prepaid for a poor Indian lad in Agra (home of the Taj Mahal) – a self-taught, multi-tongued-fluent purveyor of bangles to foreign tourists – to receive an education in the local school. I knew that if the money were given to his parents, the education would never happen, but even though school was free, he was deprived of an education because he couldn’t afford the books, school supplies and most importantly, the mandatory school uniform. I accompanied him to each shop, making sure that there would be enough money to keep him well-supplied for quite a while. My reward, a couple of years later, was a thank-you note, handwritten in English.

India’s population is growing faster than that of China; it’s only a matter of time before India passes the Peoples Republic to become the most populous nation on earth. Asia is on fire with growth, even as Western economies continue to stumble under the weight of a financial collapse that still holds exceptionally high unemployment rates, decimated real estate values and the nasty after-effects of too much debt in the past and insufficient credit for the present and the foreseeable future. Asia is measuring what she has to do to take advantage of the “Asian Century,” and we need to learn how to recover and return to at least a modicum of prosperity.

I’m Peter Dekom, and there is a whole ‘nuther world out there watching us slide down.