India, April 21 -- Under a blazing April afternoon sun, long after classrooms had emptied, hundreds of government school teachers fanned out across the tree-lined avenues and crowded bylanes of central Delhi, identity cards around their necks, phones, notebooks and forms in hand. They knocked on doors - of bungalows guarded by security personnel, and of tin-roofed shanties tucked in narrow lanes - marking the start of what is perhaps the most extensive administrative exercise in the country: the 2026 Census.

For many, however, this was not the start of the day, but the second shift of a long one. An HT team spent an afternoon accompanying two enumerators - one assigned to high-security VIP residences, the other to a jhuggi cluster near K...