<P> While the above is true of all population censuses, the nature of society in British India posed particular problems . Even the geographically smaller post-Partition India contains a myriad of languages and cultures, ethnicities and religions, many of which have evolved over several millennia . The 1931 census enumerated nearly 20 per cent of the world's population, spread over 1,800,000 square miles (4,700,000 km); G. Findlay Shirras said in 1935 that this was the largest such exercise in the world but "also the quickest and the cheapest". Scholars such as Bernard S. Cohn, have argued that the censuses of the Raj period significantly influenced the social and spatial demarcations within India that exist today . The use of enumerative mechanisms such as the census, which were intended to bolster the colonial presence, may indeed have sown the seeds that grew to be independent India, although not everybody accepts this . Peter Gottschalk has said of this cultural influence that: </P> <P>... classifications of convenience for government officials transformed into contested identities for the Indian public as the census went from an enumerative exercise of the British government to an authoritative representation of the social body and a vital tool of indigenous interests . </P> <P> The first British attempts to analyse demographic data in a social context preceded the all - India censuses and were designed with the intent of ending the practice of female infanticide and sati, both of which were distasteful to the colonial authorities and both of which they thought to be most common among the Rajputs . The censuses that came later were much broader and, according to Crispin Bates, "more sophisticated" attempts at social engineering . Denzil Ibbetson, the Deputy Superintendent of the census in Punjab Province in 1881, said in his official report that </P> <P> Our ignorance of the customs and beliefs of the people among whom we dwell is surely in some respects a reproach to us; for not only does that ignorance deprive European science of material which it greatly needs, but it also involves a distinct loss of administrative power to ourselves . </P>

Viceroy of india when the first census in india was conducted