Snags Mar Day 1 of Caste Census

CHENNAI: The enumeration process for the Socio-Economic and Caste Census in the city got delayed on Day One owing to certain technical and logistical issues. The Chennai Corporation is the nodal agency for conducting the caste count in Greater Chennai, which consists of 200 wards with a population of 65 lakh and 14.91 lakh households. More than 3,000 enumerators were supposed to have entered the field for the count on the first day. However, while the enumerators reached their respective Charge Centres to gather their devices and tag along with their data entry operators to begin the Census, they were surprised to find that the hand-held PCs were not ready and the technicians from the Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL), the technology provider, not present at many centres. Corporation officials claimed the “index and cataloging” of data, which had to be done on everyday basis before the officials stepped out for the Census in particular blocks, had certain hiccups that delayed the start of the operations. Therefore, not enough tablet PCs were available in the morning for the rollout.“We required about 3,600 devices on Tuesday. Only about 500 got ready with the data,” said a senior Corporation official, adding that the process was meant to convert the information stored in .tif format into .jpeg format so that it is not tampered with. Till 3 pm on Tuesday, only 320 officials went out to the field.Also, the officials claimed that the number of data entry operators at their disposal was way below the required number. Each enumerator was supposed to be accompanied by a data entry operator during the house visit. Corporation Commissioner D Karthikeyan said the Corporation did not wait for BEL to provide the personnel and trained 2,500 data entry operators on its own to ensure that the process went on smoothly. He said that operations would stabilise in the next “three to four” days and the entire process would be completed as per schedule.  Issues pertaining to the transfer of data into the gadgets had also been sorted out, he said, adding that a toll-free number would be started soon for the public to register their grievances on the subject. BEL officials said that the process of uploading the required data was being done in a full-fledged manner in all of the 64 Charge Centres and all issues would be resolved “within two days”. The 40-day operations would cover 12,312 enumeration blocks.