The Wire Staff 
The Indian census, which takes place every 10 years and was due to start in 2021, has still not begun. “And it looks like it is postponed indefinitely, possibly after the 2024 elections,” says journalist Pramit Bhattacharya who has written extensively on it.
“This will cause a lot of problems,” he tells Sidharth Bhatia in this podcast discussion, since the census is the “foundational data” on which other surveys are done and social policies are formulated.
Many reasons caused this delay, including the COVID-19 pandemic and the government’s initial attempts to link it with the National Register of Citizens, which caused a lot of panic. “There was political interference with the census process,” he says.
He says if the Bihar caste census is successful, then other states will demand it, which the Union government is resisting.