Census Completion!

The main field milestone in August has been the completion of the census data collection. As I write this update, the team is gearing up for what will be their last census field session. We follow a rule of a site-wide first-pass followed by two revisits for each unfinished household. Today the field team is preparing for a second revisit at the last remaining site.

With the completion of this last batch of 10 sites in Bhubaneswar, what has been nearly a 11-month long exercise draws to a close. In this time, we have, in total, surveyed 32 sites in Cuttack, and about a 100 sites in Bhubaneswar, covering over 20,000 households in Bhubaneswar and 7,000 households in Cuttack. The overall completion rates in Bhubaneswar and Cuttack stand at around 87% and 90%, respectively.

The challenges in implementing the census survey were many. For starters, the fact that land approvals came in batches, meaning that the core team wasn’t able to be kept engaged in continuous work, presented a planning challenge. That the demographics of some sites varied considerably called for adaptation on the part of the surveyors, who would alter their work times, say, surveying early hours in the morning, and then late in the evening, in order to reach these households.

From a research perspective, we had defined a “catchment area” of 160 meters’ walking distance from the proposed toilet facility, and we survey all the households within this area, and survey a 25% random sample of the community residing outside this area. The identification of the catchment area was sometimes tricky in proximate or overlapping sites, and in sites where the bulk of the target population happened to live outside the defined catchment. Such sites were decided upon on a case-by-case basis. Further, the site selection process has been a long and challenging one, in terms of both identifying potential sites that satisfied our criteria, as well as getting their approval. In fact, some of the sites that were census surveyed, have had to be dropped, as over the course of time they were either evicted, or the approvals weren’t granted.

The census data that has been collected will serve as the sampling frame for the baseline, which is the next activity lined up. Over the next few weeks our efforts will be focused on preparing for the launch of the baseline.