Census

It is believed that the census is a very important national activity. We had gone through that exercise a few months ago. The method is to make school teachers and government and municipal employees leave their usual work and do this work. For each family, they have one or two huge sheets to be filled. But they do not seem to fill all the blank spaces. Right now the second phase of the census is going on. Today a young girl visited us for census work. So they work Sundays too, probably for families where everyone is away working during the week days. She had a huge sheet to fill for our family. she asked names, education and date of birth of all family members, which the previous person had done too. Then she carefully asked our religion. When I answered that, she got up to go. "Is that all?" I asked. "Yes" she said. "But why is there a second phase of the census?" I asked. "This one is to get in depth information" she said. "OK" I said. She went away. The last time the census person had spent a half hour getting all sorts of information from me. This time she repeated three of the previous questions, asked only one new question, and for that the nation has pulled away people compromising their work like education of school going children or administration of healthcare. An additional loss is the number of trees they must have cut to make all that paper for printing those forms. I wish they had included the religion part in the last form.