India

Information

Stories of Coherence from the field

Support to Census of India 2011

In 2008, four UN agencies namely UNFPA, UNICEF, UNDP and UNIFEM came together as team and approached the Census Organization offering support to Census of India 2011. A series of consultations with the Census Office on the nature and size of support culminated in signing of a Memorandum of Understanding detailing specific activities to be undertaken by the various agencies along with the estimated budgets. The support amounting to $2.26 million US dollars will cover a period of five years (2008 to 2012).

The broad areas of support are the following 1. Digital mapping of Capital Cities in India: Digital mapping of 33 capital cities identifying blocks for population enumeration. This is expected to improve the quality and coverage of data in these cities.

2. Gender aspects of census: Holding gender sensitization workshops, development of gender-sensitive training modules, and publicity campaign. This will help reduce gender bias in reporting and capturing women’s economic activities.

3. Publicity and training: Development of publicity campaign and publicity materials to inform people about the importance of census and seeking their cooperation in providing truthful answers to census questions. Development of training strategy and training tools for improving quality of training. This will also include special training on gender. These initiatives are expected to improve the quality of data.

4. Data dissemination: Development of dissemination strategy and software support for dissemination of census data in user friendly manner. Development of CensusInfo 2011 based on DevInfo platform. These will help in quicker and easy dissemination of census data to users and promote use of census data.

A Steering Committee for monitoring and guiding the implementation of the activities under the MOU has been established. The Committee will be chaired by the Registrar General and Census Commissioner, India and all the participating UN agencies and the UN Resident Coordinator’s Office as members.

Census 2011

MoU for 2011 Census

Government of India-UN Joint Programme on Convergence

The Government of India – UN Joint Programme on Convergence seeks to support India for the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals as part of the United Nations Development Assistance Framework (2008-2012). The rationale behind such a support is that convergence of public resources within a rights based framework would improve fund utilization at the level of implementation (district and below) and catalyze greater effectiveness and social inclusiveness of service delivery. This is being sought to be done through strengthening integrated district planning, analysis of allocations and expenditures of social sector programmes including an analysis of the constraints and bottlenecks that affect the implementation of programmes that impact the well-being of children and women, collaborative implementation and monitoring. This is in accordance with India’s Eleventh Five-Year Plan and directives of the Second Administrative Reforms Commission of the Government of India which emphasises on rejuvenating the planning process with active involvement of the Local Self Governing Bodies.

Click here for more information.