In the current post-pandemic triggered health crisis, timely and reliable disaggregated data and statistics are critical to understanding, managing, and mitigating the human, social, and economic losses affecting billions of people. However, the disruptions to such regular and reliable data production operations such as national-level censuses caused by the lockdown of coronavirus disease (COVID-19), combined with an unprecedented surge in demand for information to monitor the spread of the virus and mitigate its impact, have presented unprecedented challenges to the data and the statistical community at the global, regional, and worldwide levels.
In addition, the pandemic struck at a time when many countries, India included, were already struggling with severe resource constraints and facing urgent calls from all sectors of society to fill the serious data gaps needed to usher in a decade of action with effective, targeted measures to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Building on the available qualitative data the current research aims to explore and analyze the problems standing in the way of accurate, safe, and prompt data collection in light of the Covid-19 pandemic, by conducting an in-depth study of the now postponed Indian census 2021.
