1 Ceo
2 2, In October 1854, the Chief Commissioner considered that the
3 time had arrived when a Census, after the most approved method known
4 to Indian experience, might be conveniently made in the Punjab. In-
5 structions to -this effect were accordingly issued to the Financial Com-
6 missioner. ‘It was decided that the Census should be effected not by
7 any general inquiry regarding the inhabitants and fixed residents or
8 floating population, nor by any calculation of average number of souls to
9 houses, enclosures or families, (both of which methods have been adopt-
10 ed on different occasions in India,) but by actual enumeration of the
11 people, as they were, all over the country at one given time. With this
12 view it was prescribed, that all persons should be numbered who might
13 sleep in any house of every city, town, village, hamlet, and detached
14 tenement, bearing a known name, during the night intervening between
15 the 31st December 1854 and the Ist January 1855. A similar opera-
16 tion had been conducted throughout the North-Western Provinces on
17 the Ist January 1853, and the details’ of that great work had been
18 lucidly arranged, and minutely described in a Memoir prepared by Mr.
19 J. G. Christian, Secretary, Sudder Board of Revenue, and published by
20 His Honor the Lieutenant-Governor. The Punjab Officers were there-
21 fore referred to the rich fund of experience hereby afforded, in executing *
22 the Census of 1855. for these Territories. ,
23 8. On receiving his instructions, the Financial Commissioner issued
24 orders to the District Authorities, supplying them with forms of State-
25 ments to be used by those engaged in the numbering of the people, and
26 of the Statements of villages and landed area to be filled in by the
27 Revenue Officials. A code of brief and simple instructions was drawn
28 up for the guidance of the enumerators, enjoining that the inmates of
29 each house be counted, the houses being classified according to the
30 enclosure wherein situated ; that the name of the head of the family and’
31 the numbers of each sex be entered in the appropriate columns of the
32 prescribed Statement; that no person who might sleep on the particular
33 night within any dwelling, whether regular occupant or stranger within
34 the gates, should be excluded ; that members of a family who might. be
35 away from home should not be reckoned in their own house, but in the
36 place where they might be sleeping at the time of enumeration. It
37 was also declared that the Census should include the residents of Stations,
38 Military Cantonments and Sudder Bazaars, For this latter purpose the