How many villages in india

The difference in numbers across databases does not just pose a problem for administrative and monitoring purposes as several articles have pointed out - but it spells doom for public and welfare policy in the country. For those who are familiar with the policy making processes in the country are aware that policy making in India is often arbitrary, seldom based upon prevalent trends, ground realities or data and mostly done in order to fulfil commitments to international conventions.

The entire law was repealed and re-enacted, but in the process of re — formulating this law, the policy makers did not take into account or look at the number of persons with mental illness in the country or the trends and prevalence of the kind of mental illnesses. It was once the Bill was introduced in Rajya Sabha for passage that points regarding data, prevalence and trends were raised.

However, despite the lack of data the Mental Health Care Act was re-enacted and passed, to fall in line with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disability, of which India is a signatory.

An effective policy finds its foundation in being data and evidence driven — both of which are absent in the country. It is terrifying in itself that policies are not data and evidence driven, adding to that is now the fact that there is no clarity on the exact number of villages which, let me remind you, is the basic unit for administration which makes the scenario even more petrifying.

This recent revelation also goes on to show how convergence among the various governance and administrative structures in the country is entirely absent, with all of them operating, planning and monitoring projects based on their own definitions and criteria.

Also exposing one of the many reasons public and welfare policies in India are failing. The absence of such basic and critical data has implications not just for governance and administration, but also in terms of planning and, resource and budget allocation at the village level.

It also poses a challenge for local governments and administrative structures to develop holistic and nuanced plans and interventions. The present government must with urgency and without further delay address this huge gap in data and plan for ways to develop a common database which is used by all concerned government departments in developing and implementing government schemes and policies more effectively and efficiently. Standardisation of data would also contribute to the decentralisation of governance, providing local governments the opportunity to work more effectively and directly with those concerned in a democratic and participatory manner.

The Fascinating Game of Numbers 7 hours ago. 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. In fact, different government departments adopt different administrative units to operate and monitor their programmes. For example, all rural development schemes operate at the gram panchayat level.

Depending on the size of population, a gram panchayat may consist of a single village or a cluster of adjoining villages. There are an estimated , of these gram panchayats in the country today. The ministry of human resource development's flagship scheme, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan, operates at the school level—a village typically has more than one school. The ministry of women and child development operates at the level of anganwadi courtyard shelter --one for every 1, people.

So, a school , gram panchayat , anganwadi and a s ub-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. Implications of not having a single source of geographical units. 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 schemes--and tracking development gaps for different geographies becomes a herculean task. 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. First, to understand which specific regions need to pull up in development as a whole, it would require a lot of customised reports across sectors. For example, if Bulandshahr district in Uttar Pradesh is not performing on par with others, it will need a couple of reports to figure out which villages are lagging behind, and on which parameters.

Or, if a sub-centre is faring sub-optimally, it might not reflect which specific villages need better infrastructure in this regard, especially if that sub-centre serves more than one village. Secondly, depending on the department, sub-units of a district may constitute either blocks or tehsils , making it difficult to get a holistic development view of a tehsil or sub-district. That is because we don't have a mapping of blocks to each tehsil. What is the government doing to standardise geographies?

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 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. Using a master geography curtails mismatches significantly. 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.