Blitz Bureau
The Government on June 16 issued a notification to conduct the Census. The notification issued by the Home Ministry said, the reference date for the Census shall be 1st March 2027, except for the Union Territory of Ladakh and snow-bound non-synchronous areas of the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir and the states of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand. For these areas, the reference date shall be 1st October, 2026. The Census will be conducted in two phases.
Phase one will be House listing Operation, in which the housing conditions, assets and amenities of each household will be collected. In the second phase, which will be Population Enumeration, the demographic, socio-economic, cultural and other details of every person in each household will be collected.
In this Census, Caste enumeration will also be done. For Census activities, about 34 lakh enumerators and supervisors and around 1.3 lakh Census functionaries will be deployed. The ensuing Census will be conducted through digital means using mobile applications.
Provision of self-enumeration would also be made available to the people. Very stringent data security measures would be kept in place to ensure data security at the time of collection, transmission and storage. This Census will mark the 16th national Census since its inception and the eighth since India’s Independence.
India’s Census is a monumental exercise — one of the largest administrative operations in the world — conducted every 10 years. It is not just about counting people; it’s about understanding the nation.
The first synchronous Census in India was conducted in 1881 under British rule, and since then, it has been carried out every decade without fail — until the Covid-19 pandemic delayed the 2021 Census. This exercise is overseen by the Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner under the Ministry of Home Affairs.
India’s Census covers over 1.4 billion people, involving more than 30 lakh enumerators — mostly school teachers and government employees — who physically visit households across urban skyscrapers, rural huts, remote tribal settlements, floating villages on rivers, and even homeless street dwellers.
The Census is conducted simultaneously in 16+ languages and over 8,000 dialects, making it not just a logistical but also a linguistic marvel.
Stories from the fields
Enumerators often become storytellers. In remote Ladakh, enumerators trek on yaks to reach nomadic herders. In the Sundarbans, they ride boats to reach families living in mangrove islands. In Rajasthan’s deserts, camel rides are used. Each Census becomes a tale of ingenuity and dedication.
In one memorable instance, during the 2011 Census, an enumerator in Kerala found an elderly woman living alone in a forest, who had never been counted before. The woman wept upon learning she was now “officially part of India.”
During Census 2001, a tribal community in Andaman Islands initially refused to cooperate. The enumerators, guided by local leaders and translators, slowly built trust over days by sharing meals and even participating in their dances before getting the required information.
Traditionally, India’s Census has been a paper-based operation, with over 10 million schedules printed and transported across the country. Only recently has the Government attempted to digitise some parts of it, including a proposed self-enumeration option through a mobile app for the next Census.
Census data informs everything, from parliamentary seat delimitation and Government welfare schemes to school construction, healthcare access, and disaster response planning. It’s the backbone of planning in a diverse democracy.
Though caste was last comprehensively counted in 1931, there is great debate around collecting caste data again. The Socio-Economic Caste Census (SECC) of 2011 attempted it, but its results were never fully released due to classification challenges.