COLUMN ONE : Creating a Mosaic of India : Census takers look at the personal lives of 844 million people. They find literacy rates up, women growing scarce and the population rising at an ever-alarming pace.

A band of 500 or so religious zealots in the extreme northeast Indian state of Mizoram categorically refused to answer any of the 23 questions. If they did, they insisted, the world would come to an end. “God has ordered us not to speak,” their chief explained.

An old woman in the Punjab also remained mum. She was 102 years old and a bit senile, and she shouted that if she answered the questions, her grandsons would be drafted into service in the Persian Gulf War.

As for the red-light district in Bombay, that decaying and infamous urban ribbon known as Falkland Road? Well, forget it. “Get out! Get out!” a burly madam shouted to the young teacher with questionnaire in hand outside one bordello. “There’s nothing here for you!”

There was a major success on remote North Sentinel. A tribe on the island of the Nicobar chain in the Bay of Bengal answered the questionnaire for the first time--the initial contact between the ancient people and the outside world--although it did take a bribe of several dozen green coconuts before they agreed.

So went last month’s mardam sumari-- literally translated from the ancient Urdu, “the man count”--India’s 11th nationwide census. The once-a-decade work is an attempt at self-quantification and analysis of the world’s most diverse, confounding and anarchic nation. It remains one of the most massive tasks on the globe, second only to that in China in its enormousness.

India’s 1.7 million census takers finally finished their job a few weeks ago--canvassing, counting and recording the personal details of 844 million men, women and children who speak at least 106 different mother tongues in more than 640,000 villages, towns and cities scattered across 2 million square miles of the most rugged, remote countryside on earth.

And as India’s 44,000 tabulators at centers throughout the country have begun to release their preliminary results, it is already clear that this year’s census has revealed yet another hyperbole about the Indian nation: Its population is so huge and is growing so fast now that one of every six people on the planet is an Indian.

The discovery that India’s population, already the world’s second-largest, continues to grow at a steady, alarming rate of 2.2% a year--”the equivalent (in the last decade) of adding an entire Japan, two-thirds of an America or 15 Australias each year,” according to Indian census director Amulya Ratna Nanda--came as a shock even to India.

“The message of the census is loud and clear: India’s family planning program has failed,” declared Ashish Bose, a professor of population studies who is affiliated with two prestigious New Delhi universities.

But there was another even more alarming discovery in the census bureau’s recently released preliminary report, the initial findings of a head count that began Feb. 9 and ended on March 5, using sunrise on March 1 as a reference point.

It is simply that the Indian woman continues to rank among the world’s most endangered species, dying off in increasingly faster numbers than Indian men as a result of escalating neglect, murder and, in the past decade, rampant feticide.

In India today, there are 929 women for each 1,000 men, five fewer than 10 years ago, leaving it now with the second-lowest ratio of women to men in the world behind China, a nation infamous for widespread female infanticide. By comparison, in America there are 1,050 women for every 1,000 men.

For population analysts such as Bose, there are several reasons for the decline in India’s female population, a trend that has continued virtually unabated in every Indian census since 1891.

All the reasons reflect the fundamental, widespread discrimination against women throughout Indian society, an ancient, enduring bias so passionate that ultrasound clinics have sprung up in recent years throughout the country where expectant parents can determine whether their unborn child is male or female. If it is a girl, it is aborted on the spot.

“Technology is worsening things because of this amniocentesis technique, and that must have reduced, comparatively, the number of women,” Bose said, referring to another modern method that can be used to determine the sex of an unborn child.

Even after they are born, girls get far worse care, less food and fewer clothes than boys, particularly in rural India. Bride-burnings, in which women are killed by their in-laws for bringing an insufficient dowry into a marriage, are escalating exponentially in modern, urban India, where a new wave of consumerism has spawned a greedy, growing middle class.

But Bose quickly added that most analysts suspect women are deliberately undercounted in the census, as well.

“To me, this is also a reflection on the status of women,” he said of the government tally. “Why did the men forget to count the women? You know, I have this book written by the British census official during colonial times, ‘Census of India, 1891’ . . . and he takes a whole chapter to try to explain why India has a low sex ratio. If I reproduce this chapter and say it was written in 1991, people will believe that, because exactly the same reasons are still persistent.”

India’s powerful resistance to cultural and social change, however, is also a boon to the demographers and enumerators who now are attempting to piece together the strange mosaic of the Indian nation. Simply stated, it makes the Indian people easier to count.

“Because we have 110 years of history of census conducted through the great British Raj, which terrified the people, every villager, even in the remote tribal village areas where even the jeep cannot go, they knew what was a mardam sumari ,” Bose said. “Also, because this is a government endeavor, they all want their names in. Unlike the situation in Germany or the U.S.A., where they are challenging the government for encroaching on their personal life, here they are all keen to see they are counted.

“The poorer you are, the more eager you are to get your name enrolled in the government records,” he said, explaining that many of India’s desperate people believe that to do so just might bolster shaky claims to meager holdings or the potential of possibly receiving some future government aid. “So, the more remote, the more inaccessible, the more poor, the more illiterate, the better the data.”

No one, not even census director Nanda, claims that the Indian census is 100% accurate. After all, enumerators have clambered around the world’s highest mountains, splashed through flooded river deltas, braved thick, tiger-infested forests and combed endless urban mazes of shanties and pavement dwellers to take their count. But they insist that, within 1.8%, India’s census ranks high among the world’s most accurate head counts.

“There are two types of errors,” Bose explained. “One is the coverage error--the total count, how good it is. And I’m convinced it is a very good count. The other is the content error. How good are these 23 questions we asked and the replies we got?

“In the Indian census, the content error is high, the coverage error is low. In the American census, the coverage error is high, but the content error is low. I’m convinced ours is a very good head count, probably the best in the world. . . .”

On the “content” side, Bose and other demographers expect only vague trends to emerge from the more detailed questionnaires, the 23 questions that ranged from asking Indians what material their dwellings’ walls are made of (“grass, leaves, reeds, bamboos, mud, unburnt bricks, wood, burnt bricks or metal sheets” were the choices) to the characteristics of their family, questions that included language, caste, religion and age.

“The most unreliable would be age,” Bose explained. “Many people just don’t know, because we have no registration system. The other unreliable statistics are age of marriage and the number of children born to someone.” They are unreliable because of respondents’ “memory lapses,” he said.

Other, more reliable preliminary census statistics show another key trend in the changing face of India, a nation that prides itself as the world’s largest democracy, Bose and others say. They are the figures on the literacy rate of the impoverished nation. Although the statistics show improvement over a decade ago, analysts like Bose insist that even those gains are not as great as they should be.

Census director Nanda and other government officials in key ministries praised the findings that indicate the national literacy is now 52.1%--up from 43.5% just a decade ago. For the first time in Indian history, the officials have announced proudly, more than half of the Indian nation can read and write.

But on closer analysis, even that apparent success story has a darker side: Male literacy is 64%, while only 40% of India’s women are literate; female literacy did increase by a full 10% since the 1981 census.

“There is no doubt that in the last 10 years we have made significant progress in the field of female education. However, for me, it is not enough,” Bose said. “The end product is, 60% of our women are still illiterate.

“There are success stories,” he added. “I would not damn the whole thing. However, I would think twice before giving any bouquets to the literacy mission. The issue is not at what rate you’ve progressed. The issue is that, as of 1991, we have the world’s largest illiterate country. That I find shameful and shocking, and there is no use trying to justify it.

“So literacy figures to me are depressing,” he said. “The growth rate figure is depressing. The sex ratio figures are depressing, and the total population figure is depressing.”

And yet, taken as a total picture and process, few in India were as delighted as Bose to witness the immensity, diversity and peculiarity of India’s decennial exercise. He toured the nation during the count and helped produce two television documentaries on the census, which aired last week on India’s state-run national network.

In the first show, broadcast last Monday night, the narrator captured the spirit of the census when she noted in her opening remarks, “The operation was directed from modest and temporary government offices of World War II vintage next door to a five-star hotel in New Delhi--not altogether inappropriate for a country like India, where tradition blends with modernity and bullock-cart technology coexists with space rocketry.”

And Bose himself explained last week that “the great thing about the census is it really portrays the multiplicity of religions, caste, languages, dialects, variety of housing situations and landless and houseless pavement dwellers.”

“Here, all generalizations are true. Every possible situation exists. India is a great zoo and a museum rolled into one. The human beings have such a diversity of language, of dress, of manners, of customs, of beliefs, of superstitions, of human behavior.

“In short, the census is a snapshot of this nation at a single point in time. And, even in spite of the problems it reveals to us, it unfolds into this beautiful and diverse mosaic for all to see in its wonder.”

INDIA: A CENSUS SNAPSHOT * Population: 844 million (438 million men, 406 million women) * Ratio of women to men: 929 per 1,000 * Area: 2 million square miles * Percentage of total global area: 2.42% * Population density per square kilometer: 267 * Villages, towns and cities: 640,000 * Different languages spoken: 106 * Population growth rate: 2.2% * Literacy rate: 52.1% * Literacy by gender: 64% of men; 40% of women * Censuses conducted: 11 * Duration of survey: 24 days * Census takers: 1.7 million * Census tabulators: 44,000 * Census questions asked: 23 * Accuracy: Plus or minus 1.8% How India’s Population Compares China: 1.13 billion India: 844 million Soviet Union: 290 million U.S.: 250 million Japan: 124 million Mexico: 88 million Germany: 77 million Australia: 17 million Source: Preliminary report of “The Mardam Sumari,” India’s 11th Decennial National Census.