In their 2008 article “A Sociology of Quantification,” Wendy Espeland and Mitchell Stevens describe the immense bureaucratic effort required to quantify populations:

Chapters 3–6 trace the extensive infrastructure involved in the production of caste-wise data. In response to organizing by caste census advocates, the Congress-led government conceded to collect caste-wise data and then mobilized massive financial, human, and technological resources to do so. This infrastructure included, but was not limited to, executive bureaucrats who blocked the caste-wise enumeration in the census and pushed it into a BPL survey; MoRD administrators in Delhi who had been revamping the BPL survey for several years, who collaborated with the MoHUPA and the ORGI to coordinate and manage the combined BPL survey and caste-wise enumeration; state and local government officials that oversaw the implementation of the extensive ground operations for the survey; PSUs that managed electronic data entry operations; private firms that bid for, and secured, PSU-managed government contracts to staff and implement electronic data entry; charge centers—or the local hub for data collection operations, where data collectors uploaded interview data to a government server—and the people and technology that the staffed charge centers across the country; the government server hosted by the National Informatics Centre (NIC) that stored all collected household data; the entire training infrastructure for data collectors which prepared them to conduct household interviews; the hundreds of thousands of enumerators and DEOs who interviewed households, as well as the supervisors who monitored their work;