The challenges that countries face collecting and storing up to date information
Digital Workbook and Paper Jotter
Read through the background information
Take notes of the information and diagrams about the different challenges of data collection
Nomadic Tribes which move around can be difficult to find and track down or you could risk counting them twice.
The terrain is very challenging as there are no roads, permanent settlements with extremes of temperature. This is also true for mountainous and polar regions.
Remote and rural communities can be hard to get to or do not have good communications to send paper or digital surveys to.
War-torn regions are not concerned with doing accurate census accounts as it requires a lot of people to carry out and they will not be able to accurately survey the most dangerous areas.
We did not carry out a census in 1941 due to World War 2.
Ethnic groups within a country may also distrust the government for collecting information, worried about what they will do with it. India is currently trying to collect information about Muslims in their country and expel them if they do not have the proper paperwork.
Census take a long time to carry out effectively, we may all complete it on one day in the UK but they take years of planning and collation of data afterwards. The results are not normally full compiled until over a year after it is taken.
Census are very expensive to carry out as so many people need to be employed (the U.S census alters the unemployment rate by 0.2%). They also have to produce and print in the official languages of that country.
India has between 2 and 19 569 official languages.
The Indian Union recognizes 2 official Languages
2011 Census Reported 19569 separate “mother tongues”
The Eighth schedule which sets Official languages into the constitution lists 22 languages
– with 44 other languages requesting inclusion
For India with 1.3 billion people and all of these languages it is a huge task to take an accurate Census.