"What's the flag?" she said. All postings had a flag — a reason they were being sent out for field verification instead of the standard district-level enumeration that handled most of rural India.
"Previous census returns from the district have inconsistencies in the sub-district data," Pandey said. He had the vague, competent manner of someone summarising something he had read once and had not thought about since. "Nandgaon specifically hasn't been included in district totals for several cycles. Probably a data entry issue. Could also be the village was resettled and not properly registered. You know how it is with these small settlements — they fall through the gaps."
"How big is the village?"
"Unknown. That's part of why you're going. If there are residents, you enumerate them. If the settlement is abandoned, you document that and we close the file." He looked at her with the expression of a man who had given her the folder and considered the matter adequately addressed. "Standard field verification protocol. Take the forms. Take the camera — we've been doing digital records now, everything gets uploaded. Should be two, three days at most."
Meera looked at the folder. Inside: the standard field verification paperwork, the census enumeration forms, a map extract from the district survey that showed Nandgaon as a small settlement twenty-three kilometres from the nearest sub-district headquarters on a road that the map marked with a dotted line, which was the cartographic language for "condition uncertain." At the bottom of the map, the standard land use classification for the settlement area: Uninhabited — Category 4.
"Category 4," she said.
"Yes," Pandey said. "Which is why we're verifying."
Category 4 was the classification for settlements that had been recorded as uninhabited in the baseline registers — the registers compiled during the colonial period that formed the documentary foundation of the modern census system. It was one of the older categories, dating from the administrative rationalisation that had followed Independence, when the new government had gone through the British records and classified each recorded settlement as either inhabited, uninhabited, or disputed. The Category 4 tag had specific sub-classifications depending on the reason for uninhabited status: natural disaster, resettlement, or what the colonial records called "civil emergency," which was the bureaucratic language for anything that had happened that the colonial administration had found inconvenient to describe in more specific terms.
The folder didn't specify which sub-classification applied to Nandgaon.
