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The number of villages in India is anywhere between 600,000 and one million, according
to various government databases. The number and the definition of villages vary across
databases, making it challenging to plan across sectors for a village development plan.
There are around 649,481 villages in India, according to Census 2011, the most
authoritative source of information about administrative boundaries in the country. Of
these, 593,615 are inhabited.
The ministry of drinking water and sanitation puts the figure in its Integrated
Management Information System (IMIS) database at 608,662. The ministry points out
the mismatch in this report.
IMIS Report by MDWS (as on July 16, 2017)
The Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (Gramin) report by the same ministry, pegs the number of
villages at 605,805.
Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, Status of Declared and Verified ODF Villages (as on July 16, 2017)
NOTE: *ODF Open defecation free
Source: Census 2011; Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme; Integrated Management
Information System, Ministry of Drinking Water & Sanitation; Swachh Bharat Abhiyan-Gramin
Clearly, there is not one authoritative estimate of the number of villages in the country.
It is important to get the accurate number of villages for planning and financing. A village
is the basic unit of administration and fiscal governanceit has continued to be so since
colonial times when the office of District Collector was set up to collect taxes from its
holdings, the original modern-day villages. Thanks to that legacy, the department of
revenue is the governments oldest departmentit defines and recognises a village.
If the Census is the most comprehensive record of the countrys demographic, social and
economic information, why can it not be used as the base for defining geographic units?
To begin with, the Census lists out villages other than the revenue villages, both inhabited
and uninhabited. Nearly 50,000 of the Census villages are uninhabited. There are also
forest villagessettlements inside forest areas that a state forest department classifies as
such through the process of forest reservation. Then, there are villages that the Census has
not coveredcalled unsurveyed villages. A Government of India notification has asked to
convert all forest villages and unsurveyed villages into revenue villages so that the people
living therethe majority being classified as tribalsget government welfare benefits.
All government information systems do not follow the Census list of villages for the simple
reason that the basic unit of administration is not the Census village for everyone. A case
in point is MGNREGA, which treats a revenue village and its hamlets as distinct entities,
giving us a tally of over one million villages.
So, a school, gram panchayat, anganwadi and a sub-centre service different population
ranges, and therefore do not correspond to every Census village.
This makes it difficult to get a conclusive assessment of all the schemes at one level. So if
a unified report at the sub-district or the village level across education, health, and
livelihood is required to be created, it just isnt feasible.
What this means is that while the NREGA database would recognise a particular village,
the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan database might not. This makes planning and budgeting at
the village level extremely difficult, given that matching data across sectors would be
difficult to come by. This is why it is tough to create granular plans for gram panchayats
in India for all central schemesand tracking development gaps for different geographies
becomes a herculean task.
in 2016, the ministry of rural development decided to implement the district monitoring
programme, Disha, for more coordinated tracking of 28 government schemes to help
elected representatives understand the development needs of the different administrative
units. Look at the table (Fig 3) below to get a sense of the geographic granularity of
different scheme databases under the Disha programme.
Source: SocialCops
The programme requires that a member of parliament assess the performance of these 28
central schemes at the district level and take action based on the way the district is
performing. This cannot be done unless all the data are in one place. That unified database
is yet to be created. Until then, an MP will face two major challenges.
The central government launched a Local Government Directory (LGD) to encourage all
state departments to update their record of newly formed panchayats, local bodies and
also their reorganisation to ensure that all government bodies are mapped to the
constituting geographies and that they all comply with the Census 2011 classification.
The ministry of panchayati raj, responsible for creating and maintaining the LGD, will
work through a team of coordinators to ensure that the LGD is updated with the latest
data from all the districts of the country; this will help to prepare the complete and final
database of all villages in the country.
The LGD will also include inputs from all the ministries it works with so that all databases
follow the same geographic base, helping create a unique master list of administrative
units.
However, the adoption has been low and its use far from ingrained. States are failing to
update the LGD regularly. As per LGDs Updation Report, only Andhra Pradesh and
Puducherry have completed the status of Panchayati Raj Institutions.
SocialCops, a New Delhi-based data intelligence company that works with different
government departments, has created a geography standardisation tool as part of its
platform that reconciles the anomalies in different geographies occurring in government
datasets. The aim is to develop a composite master database so that datasets for education,
demographics, livelihood, health, and so on, that currently exist in silos can correspond
with and talk to each other.
An example from a case study will help explain how a data mismatch because of confusing
names can be tackled. The Census identifies a sub-district in Nashik, Maharashtra, as
Yevla. However, some of the government information systems that SocialCops has
worked with, including the Nashik district administration, use the name Yeola for the
sub-district. Further, this sub-district is easily confused with another sub-district called
Deola, also in Nashik. As a result, Yeola tends to get replaced with Deola, given it is the
closest match, and therefore all data that are collected for the former get reported for
Deola. However, through the standardisation tool that automatically replaces Yeola with
Yevla, it is possible to correct inaccuracies from creeping into the datasets.
The geography standardisation tool also helps to correctly match one dataset against
another, creating a database of geographies across sectors and across time periods. The
system is intelligent enough to know, for example, that Panchsheel Nagar was created out
of Ghaziabad district in 2011, and was renamed to Hapur in 2012. Therefore, the datasets
will be able to match Hapur with Ghaziabad district from 2012 onwards.