India enacted a law to govern headcounts, the Census Act, 1948, two years before the adoption of its constitution. Later, the constitution made the census a sine qua non of power and resource sharing across tiers of government. The nascent post-colonial state, though, valued the census for yet another reason: the ability to successfully execute a large-scale scientific administrative exercise was integral to its self-imagination as a modern democracy. But low literacy rates and limited means of communication made it difficult to build awareness about this crucial exercise. So, the government relied on postal networks to advertise the census. 

Apart from building awareness, the postal department also helped manage logistics of the gigantic exercise and track its progress by facilitating communication between field enumerators and census officers. These functions of the postal department are going to be largely redundant after the introduction of mobile-based applications to collect data. So, this is perhaps the right time to revisit the story of how the humble post office facilitated decennial population censuses that are the backbone of India’s statistical system.

Curator