HLO App glitches force census enumerators back to pen and paper

Pune: On a hot Sunday morning, an enumerator entered a society on Salunke Vihar Road. “I hoped to finish in three hours if the house-listing operations app worked well. It didn’t and I spent half the day writing down people’s data,” she said.

Nearly three weeks into India’s first fully digital house-listing operations exercise for Census 2027, enumerators across state encounter glitches in app. They collect data on paper and upload it later, a workload that undermines the promise of a paperless census.

The house-listing phase began on May 16 and was designed to replace traditional paper schedules with a smartphone-based application capable of capturing building coordinates, household details and responses to the 33 questions digitally. Real-time uploads, seamless monitoring and faster processing of data was to follow.

But enumerators said repeated synchronisation failures have forced them to maintain handwritten records as a safeguard against data loss.

Another census worker from Pune said, “We cannot risk losing information, so we write it down on paper and update it on the app later. What was supposed to be a digital exercise has become a combination of paper and digital work,” she added.

The synchronisation is at multiple stages. Enumerators need the internet to log in and authenticate devices, retrieve self-enumeration records using the 11-digit self-enumeration ID and upload after every 10 to 15 completed records to central servers to prevent loss of information.

But when connectivity is patchy they spend the entire day collecting information and then sit up late into the night uploading data. “A process meant to reduce paperwork has only increased it,” a school teacher deputed as an enumerator in Pune division said.

The consequences extend beyond duplicate work. Unless records are synchronised, the information collected will not reflect on the monitoring system used by supervisors to track progress.

“We may complete 20 to 30 houses in a day, but if the app does not sync, our supervisor cannot see the work. The system shows no progress even though we have spent the entire day outside houses,” an enumerator from Pune district said.

The heat is a bigger spoiler. “We walk from one society to another carrying smartphones, power banks, paper forms and water bottles. After spending the entire day collecting information in the heat, it is discouraging when the entries do not get reflected in the system because the synchronisation has failed,” the enumerator said.

The job is exhausting. Many teachers, anganwadi workers and govt employees are enumerators and have been assigned more than 300 households, apart from revisiting locked homes and updating incomplete records.

An enumerator from Nashik district said residents are waiting to answer questions, but the application takes time to update records or synchronise information.

Some field staff said they struggle with the application. “I had to seek help from a friend to understand some functions while continuing the survey on paper,” an enumerator from Marathwada said.

Another said data syncing is never complete. “I informed my supervisor and was told to continue collecting information on paper and upload it later. This is the third day the app has not synchronised properly.”

Officials in Pune acknowledged that some enumerators have reported technical issues and said they have to raise them with designated IT support teams. State census officials said that there is an SOP to address these issues.

The exercise is physically demanding. Enumerators spend long hours walking around residential complexes, slum settlements and villages covering hundreds of households spread across large geographic areas.

“We leave early in the morning and continue till evening. After returning home, there is still data entry work pending. The pressure is immense because targets have to be completed,” an enumerator from Konkan region where the days are hot and humid said.

Repeated visits to locked homes are telling. In urban areas, a single enumerator covers several housing societies and hundreds of flats, making multiple rounds to contact residents unavailable during earlier visits.

Lakhs of households are still to be covered in the house-listing phase and enumerators said a more reliable application can deliver India’s first digital census.