Religion a concern as India's national census starts

(April 06, 2010) As India began a census of its more than 1 billion people, some Christian Church officials have expressed concern about how the process would deal with religions. The once-in-10-years exercise, billed as the world’s largest census process, began April 1st, with the recording of Indian President Pratibha Patil’s income, employment and educational details. “The first phase of the census covers only the household questions. We are concerned about whether religion will be there in the second phase,” said Rev. Enos Pradhan, general secretary of the Church of North India synod.
The current census is the 15^th one. Some 2.5 million officials are expected to visit every household in the country of some 1.2 billion people. Catholic and Protestant Church leaders welcomed the exercise saying it is needed to plan developmental projects for the needy. However, they also expressed concern about how people’s religions are recorded. For example, the 2001 census showed India had a little over 24 million Christians, a figure that did not tally with those provided by Christian organizations. The Catholic Church claims there are 17 million Catholics in India, while the National Council of Churches in India, an association of the country’s 29 mainline Protestant and Orthodox Church groups, claims a membership of 13 million people.
Some dalit do not reveal their religion, since they fear that revealing their religion would render them ineligible for statutory benefits granted by the Constitution. According to some Church estimates, dalit make up 60 percent of Christians in India. The last census in 2001 estimated that Hindus formed 80.5 percent of India’s 1.02 billion people. Muslims and Christians at 13.4 percent and 2.3 percent of the population respectively, formed the largest religious minority communities. Next came Sikhs, at 1.9 percent, and Buddhists, at 0.8 percent.