A video of Assam teacher Rumi Deka carrying out Census 2027 fieldwork with her twin daughters by her side, one carried in her arms, the other holding her hand, has gone viral, drawing widespread praise online.
Deka explained she had little choice but to bring her daughters along: the fieldwork involved visiting multiple households, and she had no way of knowing how long each round would take, making conventional childcare arrangements impractical.
What made the video resonate isn’t really the dedication on display, praiseworthy as it is. It’s that the clip made visible a logistics problem that usually stays invisible: the improvised, ad hoc childcare workaround that working parents build quietly, without anyone watching, most days of the year.
A person identifying himself as Deka’s husband clarified in the comments that her regular teaching job and her Census assignment are separate, with her school close to home while the Census duty requires travel across different households, a distinction that matters because it shows this wasn’t a routine part of her job design, but an exception she had to solve for on her own.
For anyone building systems that rely on a workforce with caregiving responsibilities, whether a gig platform, a field-sales team, or a government fieldwork assignment like this one, the lesson isn’t really about praising individual resourcefulness. It’s about noticing how much operational load gets quietly absorbed by workers improvising around a system that wasn’t designed with their full circumstances in mind.
The warm public reaction is genuine and deserved, but it’s also worth sitting with the underlying gap the video accidentally exposed: a well-designed field assignment process would have accounted for this kind of constraint before it needed heroics to solve.
The video is among a string of recent human-interest clips from India’s ongoing Census 2027 preparatory exercises to draw attention on social media.
Photo of the Census enumerator mascot, Wikimedia Commons, GODL-India (representative census-duty image)