A census and some concerns

Sri Lanka is in the process of having its first census after 1981, and there is concern in several sections about, among other things, the demographic picture that will emerge.

AFTER years of making do with guesstimates and provisional projections, Sri Lanka is finally conducting its first proper census since 1981. The process, which will extend through June and July, will provide vital information on population trends and is eagerly awaited by social scientists and government planners.

For many, a census represents just a boring collection of statistics. But in fact it provides a social, historical and political map of a country, and in the case of Sri Lanka, where ethnic composition is the single most important source of political tension, also a political tool.

The enumeration process in the island began last year itself, and the two preparatory stages, the mapping of census blocks at the smallest administrative level and the marking of households, are over in most parts of the country.

This process is expected to be completed soon in areas controlled by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in northern Sri Lanka, where it began late owing to logistical difficulties but is being carried out by the government's Census and Statistics Department with the help of United Nations aid agencies.

The preliminary count takes place between June 25 and July 5, while the final tally will be taken on July 17 when as many as 100,000 specially trained enumerators will fan out island-wide, calling at every home and meeting people on the streets, to ask the 25 questions that form the meat of Sri Lanka's 13th national census.

Social scientists are already rubbing their hands in anticipation. "It will be an exciting census, a minefield of information," said S.T. Hettige, sociologist and Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Colombo.

ALTHOUGH a census was due in 1991, it was put off as southern Sri Lanka was still recovering from the after-effects of an armed insurgency, while in the North and the East a war raged between government forces and the LTTE.

At the last census, in 1981, Sri Lanka had a population of 14.85 million. It is estimated that in the two decades since, the population has grown at an ideal pace of not more than 1.1 per cent a year, and that the number might be just under 20 million now.

Sri Lanka's growth rate is one of the lowest among developing countries and its fertility rate is the lowest among all countries in South Asia. Director-General of the Department of Census and Statistics A.G.W. Nanayakkara said that the enumeration might reveal a rate of birth that is even lower than 2.1, which it is believed to be at present.

According to a population survey conducted by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) three years ago, fertility had dropped to below the replacement level - which means the birth rate was lower than the death rate - and was lower than that in some developed countries. In fact, Sri Lanka is the poorest country in the world to have achieved below-replacement fertility, according to the UNDP.

Sociologists attribute this to various factors. Sri Lanka is considered a model nation when it comes to family planning. Its 'small families' campaign of the 1970s was a success owing to its high level of female literacy, which is 90 per cent now. But the fall in total number of births a year from about 4.2 lakhs in 1981 to the provisional figure of 3.3 lakhs in 1997 is attributed also to the political experiences that shaped the country's history in that period.

The crucial years seem to have been the "era of terror" between 1989 to 1991. According to the human rights watchdog Amnesty International, as many as 60,000 people were either killed or missing during those years of the brutal armed insurgency by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna and an even more brutal response by the state. Rural Sinhalese youth formed the bulk of the victims. As the violence escalated, educated and wealthy Sinhalese families emigrated or sent their children abroad.

"It will be interesting to see what the census reveals about the impact of the insurgency in the southern districts, which experienced most of the violence," said Hettige.

The other important development with far-reaching consequences for the fertility rate was the opening up of the West Asian labour market to Sri Lankan aspirants. Of the approximately one million Sri Lankans who work abroad, mostly in West Asia, the majority are women, employed as domestic servants.

In fact, women are encouraged by the government to take up employment abroad, and the government's Labour Department runs special schools to train persons aspiring to become housemaids in faraway lands. For one, it reduces the pressure on the government to provide employment. More important, it brings valuable foreign exchange into the country in the form of remittances, cushioning the government's high expenditure on the war in the North and the East.

With the government making it progressively easier for the female workforce to take up employment abroad, more and more women are now putting off marriage, and, if married, their first pregnancy. The census is likely to make available data about the impact of migratory female labour on the institutions of marriage and family.

But most important, the census will shed light on the changes in the ethnic composition of Sri Lanka in the 20 years since the last count in a manner that could have important implications for the territorial claims and political demands of the Tamil community. It was in 1981 that the ethnic conflict began spreading. The exodus of male youth from the Tamil-dominated North and East to greener pastures abroad began that year itself. Many hundreds joined the militant movements that mushroomed overnight, especially after the anti-Tamil riots in Colombo in 1983. The late 1980s saw more and more Tamils leaving the island. The consequent late or "long-distance" marriages would have naturally led to a lower birth rate in the Tamil community.

The "out-migration" of the Tamil minority peaked in the mid-1990s, with the escalation of the war between the government and the LTTE. A 1998 UNDP report warned that Sri Lanka was the country with the fastest-ageing population. It said that by the year 2025, Sri Lanka would have the third oldest population in Asia and would be the only low-income country with the population of the elderly higher than 20 per cent. The percentage of population that is over 60 years in 2025 is expected to increase to 20 per cent from the current 8 per cent.

Nowhere does this seem more obvious than in the Jaffna peninsula. By the late 1990s, even after hundreds of thousands of people had returned to Jaffna from other areas of northern Sri Lanka to which they had fled, administrators in the peninsular district were describing it as a large "old age home".

In the 1981 census, the population of Jaffna, where the bulk of the Tamil population was concentrated, was 8.3 lakhs. This year's census will record not more than five lakh people.

Tamil politicians have demanded that the census should not be conducted in the North and East on the grounds that a count done now would not give an "accurate" picture owing to the troubled conditions there. They are worried that once the depleted figures become official data relating to the Tamil population, government planners will use them to cut the development fund allocations for the region.

Also, in Sri Lanka's complex higher education system, where each district is allotted a fixed number of university seats depending upon the population of that district and competition for these seats is high, there is concern that inaccurate census figures could have an impact on access to university education.

The crucial concern is, however, with regard to the number of parliamentary seats representing the region, which is also tied to the population. Based on estimates, the number of members representing the district in Parliament has already been cut from 10 in the 1994 Parliament to nine in the present one, for which elections were held in 2000. There is also the apprehension that if the present population figure becomes an official statistic, the number could come down by as much as half.

In the eastern district of Trincomalee, which is claimed as part of the Tamil homeland, the ethnic composition of the population in 1981 was Tamils 34.3 per cent, Sinhalese 33.4 per cent and Muslims 29.3 per cent. Any change that might have occurred over the last two decades in this by and large even composition can have an interesting impact on the Tamil demand for a homeland covering the North and the East.

The demand that the enumeration be postponed in these areas is rejected by some social scientists, who argue that political concerns cannot come in the way of the preparation of such a vital document as the census, which is in any case produces a record of the present. "If changes have taken place in the population, why brush them under the carpet? We cannot continue to adopt an ostrich-like attitude to these developments," commented Hettige.

He said it was the collective responsibility of society and the polity to ensure that the facts disclosed by the census were not used by any vested interest to discriminate against a particular group in the population.

Census experts are also of the view that the counting cannot be put off. "Our main concern now is not how the census will be used, but to make sure that every person in this country is enumerated," said a top statistician of the government.

He argued that such an enumeration would actually help the government serve the population better, especially people who had been displaced by the ongoing conflict from the North and the East to other parts of the country, or within the strife-torn region.

Of the 25 questions that the enumerators will ask each person, four relate to migration within the country and should address the concerns of Tamils in the North and the East, he said. Those who have become citizens or permanent residents of other countries will naturally not be counted, while there will be a special mention of the number of people who are abroad on employment.

The LTTE's attitude to the census is not clear yet. It allowed the preliminary phases of the census to be conducted without obstruction, and it is hoped that the final enumeration in the North and the East too will go off without a hitch.

For its part, the Indian Tamil community, which mainly comprises the workforce in the tea estates of central Sri Lanka, has its own concerns - that it might be under-represented in the census. Many Indian Tamils are believed to have presented themselves as Sri Lankan Tamils in the 1981 census, out of fear and because of ignorance that the term did not refer to citizenship but only to an ethnic status.

This might be the case especially with Indian Tamils who are still dogged by uncertainty about their citizenship status. These people took Indian citizenship at the time of the 1966 Sirima-Shastri Pact and later the Sirima-Indira Pact but chose to stay on in Sri Lanka. They and their descendants are sometimes wrongly referred to as the "stateless" people. The role of the enumerator is crucial in finding out how these people categorise themselves.

While each ethnic group has its own reasons for holding on to its identity, social scientists like Darini Rajsingham-Senanayake and Radhika Coomaraswamy have argued for "pluralising" the census, making it possible for each person to place himself or herself in various ethnic categories, so that ethnic lines become blurred and ethnicity a self-constructed social identity, rather than one ascribed by birth and descent.

But Sri Lanka may not be ready for that yet. In fact, in the present census, ethnicity is deemed to descend only from the father, in spite of the numerous mixed marriages.

On the request of the Census Department, the government has declared July 17 a half holiday and will restrict public transport on the day, so that people stay at home. This is expected to help the enumerators to be as accurate as possible.

It will only take a few weeks thereafter for the numbers to be put together in a manner that the common people can understand. Many of those numbers will perhaps only confirm what is already known about Sri Lanka, but there might be some in there that could alter the way Sri Lankans look at themselves.