The Intensive Household Survey of Telangana which is deemed as the Nation’s biggest State-level survey finally concluded. Huge amount of Public money and time was spent on the survey which created enormous hype even at the national level. As the data crawls to the government, we analyze how the Survey is going to help the state.
Let us assume there are two motives behind the Survey – Exterior and Interior. The Exterior motive is to weed out the bogus white ration card holders who unlawfully enjoying various benefits of the government. And as many suspect, the interior motive is to decide the nativity of people to single out the settlers as said by KCR himself in the leaked tapes. The ‘nativity’ deciding hopes were quashed by the High Court intervention and the questions like ‘Where are you from?’, ‘Year of Migration’ were removed from the survey which almost killed the interior motive.
And coming to the exterior motive, the Survey surprisingly did not have the much needed questions like ‘Do you have a white ration card?’ and ‘Are you eligible for white ration card?”. After High court ruling that each and every question is optional and any individual can reject to answer any question spoiled the total purpose. Earlier Telangana government wanted its enumerators to evaluvate the living and economical status of the family but with the ruling of High Court, enumerators just became data entry operators who wrote down what the people want. If a bungalow owner wants the enumerator to write he does not have any source of income, the enumerator wrote it. So the Survey may not be helpful to decide the right economical status of the people. Besides these loopholes there are always the problems of human errors due to enumerators being inexperienced (Even Intermediate Students were employed) and lack of time.
