Good morning. India has launched a mammoth exercise to count all 1.4 billion people in the country – more on that below, along with the Toronto Tempo’s new star guard and the Trump administration’s tariff refunds. But first:

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Around April of 2023, India overtook China to become the world’s most populous country. Or, at least, the United Nations thinks it did. Nobody really knows for sure.

India hasn’t conducted a census since 2011. It’s meant to be a once-every-decade exercise, but the 2021 census was repeatedly pushed back, first by the pandemic, then by national elections, along with several delays that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government never fully explained. The UN had to rely on birth and death rates, plus sample surveys and some old-fashioned guessing, to estimate India’s 1.426 billion people three years ago.

But this month, India finally started counting every member of its population, kicking off a year-long tally that will remake its policies, welfare programs and political representation. For the past two weeks, residents could submit their details online through a portal offered in 16 languages. Tomorrow, the far more onerous door-to-door work begins.

The questions

India’s census – the largest ever recorded – is a colossal undertaking. More than three million officials, mostly teachers and government workers, will fan out across nearly 650,000 villages, cities and towns. “They’ll cover the length and breadth of the country, from the foothills of the Himalayas to the deserts to deep into the forests,” said Sanjay Ruparelia, a professor and Jarislowsky Democracy Chair at Toronto Metropolitan University. And for the first time, they’ll use digital technology to collect the data, armed with mobile apps instead of paper forms.

In this initial round, which runs until September, officials will ask 33 questions about basic housing conditions. Among them: How many people live under your roof? Is that roof concrete or thatched? Is there water, electricity, a toilet, a car, an internet connection? What kind of fuel do you use to cook?

The second phase, due to start next February, compiles more detailed demographic data, including age, sex, education, occupation, marital status and migration history. After much debate, officials will also survey people about their caste – something that has not happened since the census in 1931, when India was a British colony and hadn’t yet been partitioned from Pakistan.

“Post-independence Indian governments did not want to collect data on caste, because they saw it as a divisive social marker, even though caste is addressed in the constitution and all kinds of laws and policies,” Ruparelia said. Modi’s own lower-caste background has very much been part of his political narrative, but he initially opposed any sort of caste census.

The success of Modi’s nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party depends on championing Hindu unity, Ruparelia told me, and containing competition between castes. “That said, over time the Hindu nationalist movement realized that in order to attract the support of lower castes, it has to court and mobilize them as lower castes.” Onto the census it goes.

The implications

Opposition party leaders have also pushed for caste information, in order to understand whether India’s welfare system, affirmative-action policies and economic programs are working as effectively as they could. But better data should lead to better decision-making everywhere. They can determine which communities need more health and education services, for example, and can help distribute modern infrastructure more evenly.

The census will almost certainly redraw the political map of the world’s largest democracy, as well. India still bases each state’s number of seats in Parliament on the results of the 1971 census, after electoral boundaries were frozen for 25 years in 1976, then again in 2021. Over those five decades, India’s northern states have surged in population – one MP can represent upward of three million people now – while southern states experienced much slower growth. “If there’s a redistribution of seats based on population, it’s going to give more political heft to the north,” Ruparelia said.

And that, ultimately, could be good news for Modi, because opposition to his Hindu nationalist party tends to be far stronger in the south. “Other factors could affect how long he’ll remain in power, but people do worry that if seats rebalance toward the north, it’ll make it harder to dislodge the BJP from national politics,” Ruparelia told me. “So there’s really significant political arithmetic with the census, and that has huge ramifications for India going forward.”

The Toronto Tempo announced they signed star guard Kia Nurse, a WNBA veteran and three-time Olympian from Hamilton. Read more about the team’s roster move here.