​”Some did not understand why they could not include their puppy in the family, others wanted to include their cat… Everyone called and wanted an answer then, on the spot. We became a kind of call center where people called to find out about something,” INS representatives told HotNews. President of INS Tudorel Andrey lost 7 kilograms during the census.

On Wednesday, HotNews spoke with Katalin Raiu, INS Director of Communications, and Bohdan Dragia, INS Senior Advisor.

“Then there were people calling us to accuse us of the review site being down for 3 days. It worked for us. We asked them to tell us what site they were on and they told us “Recesamant.ro”. We had to explain to them that the correct form is “Recenzamant”, with p. Others, instead of “self-review”, were looking for a site where you can “self-censor”, say two statistics specialists.

And those were just the phones… We at Communication alone received more than 15,000 e-mails, say Raiu and Dragia. “They sent us different pdf files and called us at the same time to ask if we received them and how to solve them”

“Others answered 10 questions in the questionnaire and were outraged that their answers were not checked. It was hell on earth,” say statistics representatives.

An application for self-checking and a team of IT experts from Kharkiv

Few people know that the request for verification was made by the World Bank, and the IT team was from Kharkiv, Ukraine. And when we were going to finalize the application, we had no one to go with, because the IT people were again in Kharkiv, which was at the height of the war. We quickly looked for another team to finish our work, but you know how it happens, it took time for newbies to decipher all the “innards” of someone else’s application.

They go home under the protection of gendarmes

As the census drew to a close, excitement grew. In Bucharest, especially on the last day, but there were other days, we had to call the gendarmerie because there were too many people in the queue and they lost their patience. Likewise in the early days when we opened the review center at our headquarters. The schedule was until 8 p.m., and my colleagues worked as reviewers without pay. In the early days it was murder. Colleagues left the institution at 22:00 through the corridor formed by the gendarmes.

As new fixed centers were discovered, the world also redistributed itself into other centers of observation. In Sector 4, where there was only one stationary point – at the “Grand Arena”, people stood until 12 o’clock at night, when the supply stopped by itself (July 31 – the last day of the census).

What can be done better

I would be more clear about the impact of the census on specific public policy. Both the government and the private sector need to have data that can help them see where, for example, nurseries or kindergartens should be built, or help them determine the amount of transportation between different counties, the two INS officials said.

Also, they admit, maybe a public discussion about the questionnaire would be useful, maybe it would be worth doing a demo for people to test, so that at the time of RPL launch they would be familiar with the platform… “But we couldn’t because of lack of time. I gave 3-4 interviews a day, every evening I went home, where I worked until 10 in the evening…” – say Raju and Dragia.

“We tried to do the best we could with the budget we had,” they say.

“For example, we worked with a translation company to translate questionnaires. We are the country with the largest number of questionnaire translations in 17 different languages. Members of one ethnic community did not agree among themselves on the translation of a single word. And the word had to be printed, pasted on a poster and pasted in dozens of settlements,” the two explain.

Worked at least 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, at least since February. Communication staff held numerous online meetings with representatives of religious cults and national minorities. “I am very satisfied with the cooperation with religious cults and national minorities, to whom I have dedicated a monthly webinar and many, many meetings and discussions,” says Katelin Raiu.

Bureaucracy, the unemployed who do not want to earn well and the great merit of the Census: the non-politicization of the process

The world needs to understand that the census is a partnership, a shared responsibility between INS and city halls. “Maybe we didn’t have the best application that’s not an INS application, but a World Bank application,” Rau and Dragia say.

For both city halls – not necessarily the mayor as a person – did not “feel” the importance of this census from the point of view of public policy, because if it had happened, the auxiliary self-verification would have gone much better, especially in big cities.

“There were many situations when city halls called reviewers to sign contracts many days after the census began. In other words, they moved very hard. In addition, the city halls of the country had a very different attitude to the fines that were imposed. Some mayors refused to impose fines in order not to lose votes,” says Katalin Raiu. Others issued fines.

“It is a great credit to the Office of Communications that the census was not a politicized process, unlike what it was in 2011. Well, then Ponta came forward and said not to give to the CNP because who knows where this will end up…the political world stayed away. That’s right, since two years ago employees of the communications department, as well as President Tudorel Andriy, communicated with political leaders, with all parliamentary groups, I invited them to join the Commission on Communication and Transparency. The communication philosophy was that we respond to political/politicized statements with technical and non-political statements,” they say.

But, they admit, it was worth it. “Politicians did not intervene, for better or for worse, to support the Census. They stayed away…” – say the statisticians.

What did not work out, in several points

• It was not a good cooperation with the city halls. If you look at the final figures from the last release, the last place is occupied by counties with important university centers. My hypothesis, which can only be confirmed after opening the database, is that the students who were supposed to be registered there were registered by their place of residence. So you have targets in Timisoara, Bucharest, Iasi, Sibiu, Constanta. This is one of the assumptions. The second is that where the distance between the mayor and the citizens, I use the distance in the classical sense of the term public policy, is greater, the inspection was worse. In rural areas, in smaller cities, where this distance between the mayor and the citizen is smaller, the survey also went better there.

• In Botoshan, the same discussions of the reviewers once appeared – that they are not well paid, that the field work is difficult… but the prefect there talked to them, and they explained how important the census was and that this effort was needed, and finally people understood. But in other parts the prefects or mayors did not have this attitude.

How the INS came up with the idea of ​​creating fixed inspection centers

• The unemployed did not want to become reviewers, although the money was not bad – 9,000 lei net for one and a half months. That’s even if they could combine unemployment benefits with a reviewer’s allowance. They just didn’t want to. They went to those who were waiting in line to receive unemployment certificates, talked to them, but in vain: they didn’t want peace either! The pensioners said that it was more difficult for them to handle the tablets… And then we thought what to do, and seeing that there are areas in Bucharest where there is no one to go to because there are no paid reviewers, we said let’s do those fixed points though b for those who willingly look around themselves and who would wait in vain for a reviewer, because there was no one to visit them. Negotiations with the mayors were not easy.

• Where the expert was accompanied by the head of the Tenants’ Association, people were much more open to filling out the form. In addition, if the reviewer left with the questionnaires on paydays.