India to hold Census after 6-year-delay in 2027: Govt approved Rs 11,718 cr, says Vaishnaw
The I&B minister told the media that the exercise will capture caste data electronically and take place in two phases between 2026 and 2027
Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said on Friday (December 12) that the Narendra Modi government has approved Rs 11,718 crore for carrying out the Census in 2027, delayed by six years from its original schedule.
Speaking to reporters in New Delhi, the information and broadcasting minister said the Union Cabinet approved the proposal to conduct the Census at a meeting chaired by Prime Minister Modi. The upcoming Census will be the first digital exercise of its kind.
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The mammoth exercise in the world’s most populous country will take place in two phases -- house-listing and housing census from April to September 2026; and population enumeration (PE) in February 2027.
For Ladakh and snow-bound non-synchronous areas of the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir and the northern states of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, the PE exercise shall be conducted in September, 2026, Vaishnaw said.
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The Census 2027 will also capture caste data electronically in the PE phase, he added.
Nearly 30 lakh officials will complete process
About 30 lakh field functionaries will complete the exercise of national importance, which is no less massive than holding the national elections every five years.
Use of a mobile app for data collection and the central portal for monitoring purposes will ensure better quality data, Vaishnaw said.
Data dissemination will be much better and in a user-friendly way so that all queries on required parameters for policy-making will be available with a click of a button, he said.
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Census-as-a-Service (CaaS) will deliver data to ministries in a clean, machine-readable and actionable format, he said.
Last Census was held in 2011
The last census in India was held in 2011. The decennial counting measure has been postponed indefinitely since 2021, with the government asserting repeatedly that it had to be postponed because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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As per the last Census a decade-and-a-half ago, India’s population stood at 1.21 billion with a growth of more than 17 per cent since the Census done before that in 2001. In April 2023, the country overtook China to become the world’s most populous country, with the United Nations projecting its population to have exceeded 1.42 billion.
(With Agency inputs)