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States have been asked to concur to the uniform area codes for districts, blocks and villages at the national level. This, an important recommendation of the National Statistical Commission, will go a long way in facilitating permanent and unique identification of every village and urban blocks in the country. These codes would necessarily include Geo-Codes so as to locate them in a map. The Centre urged the State Governments to implement this as early as possible, here today, at a three day Conference of Central and State Statistical Organisations, which opened yesterday with an inaugural address by the Secretary, Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, Shri J.Hari Narayan. He said, strategies and programmes are being evolved for revamping the Indian Statistical System in tune with the recommendations of the National Statistical Commission.
The census organisation prior to the conduct of every census prepares an exhaustive and duplicated lists of rural and urban units for the entire country. For the 2001 census, a system of permanent location numbers was adopted by assigning a permanent location code to each village in every state and union territory. States, districts and urban blocks also have codes. Another important initiative taken during the 2001 census was the allotment of permanent location code number to each and every village. The Census Organisation has proposed to bring out new versions of the urban and rural frame every alternate year. The updated frame can be adopted by the States and Central ministries for conducting surveys and other related work. The success of the implementation of the Uniform Area Code depends entirely on the cooperation of the State Governments. The Conference focussed on this today in a bid to modernise the Indian Statistical System, the largest in the world.
For the first time in the last ten years, a Meeting of State Chief Secretaries has been organised to coincide with the Conference. It will be addressed by the Cabinet Secretary Shri B.K.Chaturvedi and inaugurated by the Minister for Statistics and Programme Implementation, Shri Oscar Fernandes, tomorrow. This meeting will mainly focus on policy issues and shortcomings in making our Statistical System more accurate, reliable and authentic. There is already a proposal to set up a Statutory Body as a Single Source, providing authentic data and statistics, which are legally valid and tenable.
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