NEW DELHI: The bright yellow survey questionnaires for census 2011’s ongoing house-listing phase are not just the census office’s way of breaking away from the drab off-white forms of the past, but a well-considered ploy to improve data collection.
The Census Commissioner’s office has sought professional help to design their schedules and questionnaires for the first time. For over a year before the census exercise began this April, the National Institute of Design (NID) has worked extensively to make the household survey forms more effective and amenable to gathering quality data. The institute is now designing the survey forms for Census’ next phase of population enumeration, which begins in 2011.
For the household survey forms, NID not only gave advice on the layout, colours, fonts and printing technology, but also advised the Census Commissioner on the sequencing of questions. The most interesting tweak in the new census forms — a unique bar code for each form — is also an NID idea. The dominant yellow colour on the forms, for instance, was chosen because it reflects light and can help surveyors fill up forms properly even in poorly-lit houses. Moreover, the bright colour is also expected to reduce interviewers’ and citizens’ fatigue while covering the 34 columns with several detailed queries.
“The colour yellow is believed to be soothing to the naked eye, it works in varying light conditions that enumerators have to deal with and it also supports most ink colours,” said senior NID faculty Rupesh Vyas, who steered the census project. Vyas’ mandate was to reduce human error, reduce fatigue for interviewers and make the data user-friendly . Something as elementary as a respondent’s birth date was filled by enumerators randomly. This would make it difficult for digital scanners to extract data in the correct format. “We have specifically said that date of birth must be in DD/MM/YYYY format,” Vyas explained.
To reduce human error in filling the data, the NID enlarged the text boxes to fill in responses to a standard 6 mm-7 mm each. This is way above the international standard of 3 mm for a scanner to read text characters. The 2.5 million Census surveyors have also been trained to write numbers in a standardised Arabic font.
NID also advised the Census office to pre-print the fields of state, city and district to avoid mixing up forms from different zones. To ease the logistics of stacking up millions of forms, the left top edge of the schedule has been slit. This simple change ensures that all the forms are stacked the right side up. Fonts and headers have been used to highlight different aspects of the questionnaire. “For instance, amenities and assets owned by the household were put under one category earlier. Now we have put them in different ones in order to avoid confusion,” Vyas said.
To make it easier for respondents to answer questions, the questionnaire has also been altered. “We did extensive research on the design of the questionnaire and advised the Census office to put the complicated, sensitive and detail-seeking questions towards the end of the questionnaire ,” Vyas said.
Before NID’s design ideas were taken on board, the census office printed 20-lakh forms for a trial run of the new design. “These schedules went to different areas of the country for field checks and also to the census offices all across the country,” a Census official said. Vyas has earlier worked on the multipurpose national identity card (MNIC) project of the home ministry — which the Unique ID Authority of India is set to replicate.
