Introduction
The United Nations (UN) defines the essential features of
population and housing censuses as ”individual enumeration,
universality within a defined territory, simultaneity and defined
periodicity”, and recommends that population censuses be taken
at least every ten years. The Census is necessary since it forms the
basis of all the plans and programmes that the government wants to
implement. Postponing the Census has immediate and long-term negative
consequences for India (Saikia, 2023) . The Census offers basic
demographic information at the block, sub-district, and city levels.
These statistics are required for the establishment of plans,
transparent programmes, and strategies for the country’s social and
economic growth. With the Census’s late completion, planners and
demographers are having difficulty in predicting population. The last
2011 Census should have been used as the base year for the population
projection of 2021, but due to the postponement of the count, the
estimation for any district or sub-block level has used the growth rate
of 2001-2011, which is good for only one decade; and increasing the time
period may result in an incorrect prediction. Every decade, the
population situation changes, and the time period even more than ten
years can bring significant changes for all population dynamics.