Census 2021: On March 25, 2020, weeks after Covid-19 was declared a pandemic and the day Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the nationwide was lockdown, the Centre decided to postpone one of the biggest data collection exercises in the world--India’s decadal population Census. Till that day, only one person had died of Covid-19 in India, according to official data from the health ministry.

       Today, while the recorded Covid-19 deaths have crossed 400,000, the real toll could be higher, as the cause of only one in five deaths gets officially registered in the country. The ...