A Statistical Account of Bengal

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: the number of houses contained in each. At the same time the police were instructed to report the name of the gumashtd and some other respectable resident of each village who could read and write. This information was tested in a few villages by Government servants whose duty took them into the interior, or by the special Deputy Collector, to whom the supervision of the preliminary work was intrusted. The village headmen or gumdshtds were then furnished with sanads of appointment as enumerators, and they were called on to furnish lists of householders in their respective villages. A special supervisor, with a staff of paid subordinates, was located at each thdnd, whose duty it was to issue the forms with the householders' houses filled in, to instruct the unpaid enumerators how to fill in the rest of the columns, and finally, to collect the returns. In case the return for any village was not forthcoming, one of the paid subordinates was sent out to collect the required information. The panchdyats (indigenous village courts of arbitration for the determination of petty disputes among the people) were also available, and afforded willing assistance in the work of enumeration, no less than 2877 members of suchpanchdyats lending their services for the occasion. Besides these, there were 3014 other enumerators employed in the District, inclusive of 121 who were paid. The total cost of taking the census of the 1,310,729 inhabitants of Rajshdhf amounted to 252, 4s. 8d. The results disclosed a total population of 1,310,729 souls, dwelling in 4228 villages, and inhabiting 246,371 houses; the average density of the population being 587 per square mile. As regards the accuracy of the census, the Collector writes as follows: ? It is my belief that the existing houses were all reached, and...