Questions On Questions

Census authorities should explain the rationale of new entries in the questionnaire

India’s first census under the Raj asked 17 questions. The ongoing 16th Census will ask 40. That’s not a bad thing because data about people helps govt plan for the future – how many cities, schools, hospitals, airports, etc to build. It also helps govt understand changing demographics – educational levels, family structure, age pyramid, etc. But census data, although collected from individuals, is always about aggregates and averages. For example, when the census asks how you commute to work, you’re just a data point. The real interest is population-wide – how people across a town or district or state commute.

That’s why census data has always been anonymised. That’s the case in UK, US, Australia. And it was so in India, too, until 2011. This time, though, you’ll be asked your mobile number, passport number and Aadhaar. And we don’t know why. Govt maintains all data collected during the census is confidential and secure, but when such specific personal details are thrown in, security and confidentiality become sharper.

In just the past two months we’ve heard about frontier AI models hacking databases wantonly. But even before that, Indian data was highly vulnerable. Recall how Aadhaar login credentials were being sold on WhatsApp for ₹500 in 2018. There was an alleged CoWIN data leak in 2023, and a confirmed ICMR breach the same year that exposed personal details of 81cr citizens. With this being India’s first fully digital census, the vulnerabilities of 30L personal phones and tablets used by enumerators must be factored in.

But the bigger question remains why phone number, Aadhaar, passport, and voter ID should be collected as part of the census. It’s OK to ask whether you have a passport, but why record the identifier? Govt should explain the necessity to citizens in detail, and if the answer isn’t convincing, or if the risks – which are real – outweigh the benefits, some questions should be dropped. Because when all these details sit together with other demographic data in one place, a “reconstruction attack” could piece together extremely detailed profiles of citizens, and make them available to bad actors. Neither a citizen nor govt wants that.