Census as Social Document/edited by S.P. Mohanty and A.R. Momin. 1996, 245 p., tables, $26.
Contents: Introduction. 1. Social implications of population growth in India/K.B. Pathak and F. Ram. 2. Poverty-induced migration and urban involution in India: alternative planning strategies/Shekhar Mukherji. 3. Occupational diversification and urbanization in India, 1971-91: levels and patterns of development/Victor S. D'Souza. 4. Opportunities for sociological research from the Indian census data/Mahendra K. Premi. 5. Census and ethnography/K.S. Singh. 6. Census and anthropological investigation: development of tribal demography/U.P. Sinha. 7. Significance of census data in the context of contemporary Indian society/S.P. Mohanty. 8. Census data for urban studies: a critical appraisal/K. Sita. 9. Urbanization and urban growth in India/Kamla Gupta. 10. Internal migration in India from the 1981 census/A. Sebastian. 11. Ethnography in Indian censuses/Harish C. Srivastava. 12. The social significance of the census/Anand Mahatme. 13. Indian census: how good a window to the world of work/Sudha Deshpande. Index.
"Since 1872 the Indian Census has been the most comprehensive and dependable source of information about the land and its people. India can take legitimate pride in having an unbroken history of census taking spanning over a century.
"The implementation of the five year plan, which was set in motion in 1951, called for a variety of census data inputs such as population growth and distribution, age-sex composition, literacy, labour force and work participation, urbanization and migration, at the national as well as the state and district levels. The significance of census data for the successful management of India's pluralistic and democratic polity has been increasingly realized. The census, far from being a numerical exercise in mere head count, has emerged as a social document.
"The present volume, which is an outcome of a national seminar, covers a wide spectrum of themes relating to the census. These include an appraisal of economic data relating to working population, an analysis of occupational diversification and urbanization, poverty-induced migration, the aging population and its economic activities, and a review of the demographic situation of the tribal population.
[S.P. Mohanty retired as Professor in the Department of Sociology, University of Bombay.]