COLUMNISTS
DIARY
SPECIALS
INTERVIEWS
CAPITAL BUZZ
REDIFF POLL
DEAR REDIFF
THE STATES
YEH HAI INDIA!
ELECTIONS
ARCHIVES

Search Rediff

Census Bureau Uses Hindi and Other Languages

R S Shankar

At the India Day Parade in New York last week thousands of participants received a packet with information in Hindi and English -- and with the exhortation, Stand Up and Be Counted. Similar packets were handed out at a number of other Indian Independence Day events.

Census 2000 is several months away but the Census Bureau has already started a campaign to encourage participation in the census, particularly by the minorities, its program's director said this week.

"It is not enough for us to be counted," says community leader Piyush Agarwal, "we should let our neighbors and friends be counted too."

Agarwal, a retired high school teacher, has been keenly interested in census proceedings for more than two decades. He is also urging people of Indian origin from Guyana, Fiji, South Africa, Trinidad and elsewhere to vote as Indians.

"We will then be more than 2.5 million people as opposed to the present 1.2 million count," he says. "Imagine, how the new numbers will boost our clout with politicians and policy-makers."

"If we are not counted," he warns, "we will join an estimated 4.5 million people who might go uncounted -- like it happened in the 1990 census."

The United States Congress is required by the US Constitution to produce, every 10 years, an "actual enumeration" of the "whole number of persons within each state."

Census data are then used to apportion congressional seats and electoral college votes to each state. These will help carry out congressional, state and local redistricting, and to monitor and enforce compliance with civil rights statutes, including affirmative action plans, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It will also monitor and employment, housing, lending, and education anti-discrimination laws.

Census results are also used to allocate billions of dollars in federal funds. Several cities have complained, claiming that undercounting in the last census caused them to lose billions of dollars of aid from the federal government.

The literature states why it is important to be counted and goes on to assure that the census data is private, and the results would not be revealed to Immigration and Naturalization Service. Many immigrants, who are either illegal or whose paperwork is defective, avoid answering the census forms.

"Each big city loses a lot of money because illegal immigrants are not being counted," says Agarwal. "This leads to bigger burdens on social service agencies which deal with poorer people." The Census literature being distributed now at various ethnic and minority events emphasizes the privacy issue.

The projected $ 166 million campaign will target the millions of people the agency historically has trouble counting, such as African Americans, Hispanics and newer immigrants, Census Bureau Director Kenneth Prewitt said.

About $ 80 million be used for ads in Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Bengali, Hindi and other foreign languages.

Hundreds of schools across the country will have Census in schools in their curriculum, where students will learn the importance of census and pass on the message not only to their parents but also to their neighbors. At least 300,000 students are targeted to get this curriculum.

The bureau, which has a budget of $ 4.5 billion, expects to get back about 61 per cent of the census questionnaires that it plans to mail out next year, Prewitt said. It would send enumerators into the streets to find those who did not return the forms.

"Look, we send the form out. If a hundred per cent of them came back in, we'd be finished,'' Prewitt said. "We expect and hope the paid advertising campaign, in language, in the communities, giving the message about what's in it for you, why your community will benefit will do something about that response rate.''

In addition to paid advertising, expected to be supplemented by promotional work by independent groups, the bureau will undertake another effort ``before long'' to reverse the declining response rate, Prewitt said.

There was no paid advertising for the 1990 census, which government and agencies dealing with minorities have criticized as the first to be less accurate than the one before it.

According to the Census Bureau, the 1990 census failed to count an estimated 4.7 million people (1.8 per cent of the population), and double-counted an estimated 6 million people, marking the first time since 1940 that a census was less accurate than the preceding one. Despite being the most expensive effort in history, this "injustice" occurred because the traditional census methods were unable to manage the increased mobility and looser family structure of contemporary Americans, experts at the Bureau point out.

In addition, the undercount of racial and ethnic minorities, referred to as the differential undercount, reached its highest level ever in 1990. Due to such factors as lower door-to-door response rates in low income areas, illiteracy, difficulty with English and suspicion or misunderstanding of the census.

Hispanics were undercounted by five percent, African-Americans by 4.4 percent, and Native Americans on reservations by 12.2 per cent. Each rate was significantly higher than the 0.7 per cent undercount of non-Hispanic whites, according to the Census Bureau.

This "differential undercount" of minorities raises serious concerns for the civil rights community. Uncounted people of color are slighted in the apportionment of congressional representatives, the distribution of federal dollars and the redrawing of congressional, state and local districts. In addition, the disproportionately high undercount of people of color skews the best source of data available for tracking and combating discrimination in employment, education, lending, voting and housing. For example, a higher undercount in urban areas directly leads to lower representation in the House of Representatives where apportionment is based on census figures.

The bureau recently asked for an extra $ 1.7 billion for the traditional population count in addition to the $ 2.9 billion already requested for fiscal 2000 which starts on October 1.

The House of Representatives included the $ 1.7 billion request in its version of a spending bill that includes the bureau, but the Senate did not. There should be one compromise version before President Bill Clinton gets to sign the bill.

"Congress has said time and time again that it wants an accurate, complete census, and it will have to pay what it's going to cost,'' the Census chief said.

"We presume, when the conversations are over, that's that what will have happened. If it doesn't, then we will scramble and give this country a different census. It will not be an accurate census."

Previous: US Sharpens Attack Against India
Next: Documentary On Desis In The Big Apple

Tell us what you think of this report