Introduction

We examined coverage and content errors in the census data for Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) and discussed their administrative, legal and political contexts at different levels of aggregation. We found that the over-reporting of children (particularly male children), a large increase in the slum population and a large increase in the number of households between the houselisting and household phases of census in Kashmir explain several interconnected anomalies in the 2011 census of J&K, including the drop in the child sex ratio (CSR), the rise in the share of child population, the rise in the population share of Kashmir within the state and the drop in the corresponding population shares of the Jammu division and groups concentrated almost entirely in Jammu such as the Scheduled Castes (SCs). Further, errors in data on non-scheduled languages, dialects of scheduled languages and tribes were also examined and attributed to political mobilisation, unintentional misclassification and a large increase in the population of Generic Tribes. Even conservative estimates of politically motivated over-reporting of the headcount, which do not account for (a) the over-reporting in 2001 that manifested in the abnormal increase in mean household size of Kashmir and (b) the over-reporting of the population aged 10–14 years in 2011, suggest that the 2011 census overestimated Kashmir's population by about 10 per cent.

We argued that the inability of the government to conduct reliable censuses in Kashmir – reflected in the cancellation of the exercise on two occasions, ad hoc changes to the reference date in other censuses and the contested nature of the data – can be explained from three different perspectives.