Anxiety, anger the day after

On the second day of the Intensive Household Survey on Wednesday, many households endlessly waited for enumerators to come knocking on the doors, but to no avail. Sore over being left out of the mammoth exercise, a sizeable cross-section of the city was left wondering what had gone wrong even as they blamed the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) for lack of proper communication.
In fact, even as several residents repeatedly called the GHMC helpline, they failed to get clear information. Frustrated, some of them headed for the nearest collection and distribution centres ? where enumerators assembled before embarking on their round ? in order to clear their confusion. Some like P Midhun, a private employee and resident of HMT Nagar, even sent an SMS to GHMC commissioner Somesh Kumar. But his complaint remained unattended.
In some cases, residents were left fuming as they were asked to ?report' at a designated place by the enumerator, as against having them visit their homes. "It is a household survey, they should come to my house," fumed Kishore Agarwal, a wholesaler and resident of Mallepally. He eventually refused to participate in the exercise.
In some other cases, the enumerators left the forms with apartment guards. "We waited till late evening, but nobody came to our house. Eventually my guard gave me the form and told me that the enumerator would come later and collect the filled forms from him," said a resident of Khairatabad.
Grievances flooded in from several residential localities like Mallepally, Kartikeya Nagar (Tarnaka), Agapura, Vijaynagar Colony, Asifnagar, Chaitanyapuri (Dilsukhnagar), Talab Katta, Bhavaninagar, HMT Nagar, Nacharam, KPHB, Red Hills, Alwal, Venkatapur, Kala Pathar and Mettuguda among others.
There were panic reactions from a few places like Talab Katta, said Mohd Abdul Akram, a social activist from Mogulpura who clicked pictures of a group of people pacifying a woman who was left out of the survey. "This lady from Talab Katta, where an estimated 50% were left out of the survey, was worried over losing her ration card," said Akram.