New Delhi: The Centre on Monday issued a notification for conducting 16th Census, thereby formally initiating the preparatory work for the largest population counting exercise after a gap of 16 years.
“….the Central government hereby declares that a census of the population of India shall be taken during the year 2027. The reference date for the said census shall be 00.00 hours of the 1st day of 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”, said the notification issued by the Office of Registrar General of India or ORGI.
“In respect of the UT of Ladakh and snow-bound non-synchronous areas of the UT of Jammu and Kashmir and the states of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, the reference date shall be 00:00 hours of the 1st day of October, 2026,” it added.
Customarily, once a gazette notification for intent of conducting Census is issued, there are various preparatory areas on which detailed discussions take place, including with data users, training of enumerators, etc but officials familiar with upcoming Census said “most of these activities have already been completed since between 2021 and now”.
The government had, last week, announced that the much-delayed Census exercise, which will include caste enumeration, will be completed by March 1, 2027. Officials have said that while the data collection would be over by March 1, 2027, the entire exercise to collate the data and publish it will take two to three more years.
On preparatory activities already done, officials said that all the states have already constituted Census Coordination Committees (CCCs) under the respective chief secretaries. “As the Census exercise was originally to take place in 2020, ORGI had already written to states/UTs for forming CCCs in April 2019,” said an officer, adding that the committees have various departments like revenue, local administration, municipal corporations, rural development and panchayats, planning education, etc for conducting and monitoring different phases of Census.
Also, the pre-test for Census – which is conducted prior to each Census encompassing all facets to check feasibility of all questions, methodologies, logistics arrangements, processing of data, etc – was also done in 2019.
“The pre-test for Census 2021, which will now be called Census-2027, was conducted in 2019 in all 36 states/UTs across 76 districts in 90 areas (54 rural and 36 urban) covering a population of 26 lakh, in which around 6,000 enumerators and 1,100 supervisors from respective states/UTs were involved in data collection and supervision,” said a second officer cited above.
The ministry of home affairs said on Sunday that the 16th Census will see involvement of about 34 lakh enumerators and supervisors. Besides, it said, around 1.3 lakh Census functionaries would be deployed for the exercise. It also said that the upcoming census “will be conducted through digital means using mobile applications” and “provision of self-enumeration would also be made available to the people”.
Like all previous Censuses, the latest Census also has a technical advisory committee (TAC) to advise on all technical issues related to the decadal exercise. The members of TAC are mainly former Census commissioners, former deputy registrar generals of ORGI, former director of Census Operations, representatives of state governments and from ministries concerned, eminent demographers, and experts from selected institutions.
The second officer cited above said the TAC held its first meeting on January 30, 2019 itself to discuss preparedness, suggestions to stakeholders, pilot test and data collection method. Its second and third meetings took place in September 2019 and December 2021, respectively.
The 16th Census will be conducted in two phases. In phase one i.e. house-listing operation (HLO), the housing conditions, assets and amenities of each household will be collected. Subsequently, in the second phase i.e. population enumeration (PE), the demographic, socio-economic, cultural and other details of every person in each household will be collected.
A third officer said that for the upcoming Census exercise, two separate mobile applications and a web portal have been developed for data collection along with its monitoring on real or near-real time basis. “The mobile apps have been developed in English and 15 regional languages as per requirement of different states,” he said.
The Census portal developed by ORGI is named as Census Management and Monitoring System (CMMS) and is for Census functionaries to monitor and manage every activity such as training, work allocation, logistics, real-time progress of work, online data entry etc.
Earlier, on Sunday, Union home minister Amit Shah had reviewed the preparations for the Census. The ministry of home affairs said after the meeting that the Census will have the option of self-enumeration by residents.
The ORGI has already developed a web-based portal called Self Enumeration (SE) Portal, which allows the respondents to view and update the information of their households members. The SE portal, according to officials, will be closed for changes, a few days prior to the census exercise start date. The objective of the portal is to digitize the process of capturing the census data, as the respondents can update the details of their family members online without the help of an enumerator.
The SE portal will be accessible with authentication based on pre-filled information available with the ORGI and a one-time password (OTP) sent to the registered mobile number(s). The respondent will be allowed to change the family details, and add new family members and those family members who are not part of the household shall be marked as moved-out or died, said an officer explaining the process.
The MHA also said on Sunday that “very stringent data security measures would be kept in place to ensure data security at the time of collection, transmission and storage (for Census)”.
On data security, the first officer cited above said “for data capture and processing, three main data-centres have been set-up and existing 18 data capture centres (DCCs) have been upgraded”.
“These data centres are properly secured using the state-of-the-art technology including next generation firewall, DDoS protection, patch management, end point protection, web application firewall, etc. There are dedicated security analysts and engineers to monitor potential security threats,” he said.
The Census forms an important node of policy making in India as it is the principal source of official socioeconomic and demographic data that forms the basis for government schemes, policies, and planning. But the 2027 census has assumed more importance because it is being held after a decade-and-a-half and will also officially confirm India’s status as the world’s most-populous nation.
It will enumerate caste for the first time since the 1931 census, a politically explosive exercise that will have sweeping socioeconomic ramifications and lead to an expansion of caste-based quotas in jobs and education, likely breaching the 50% mark mandated in a landmark 1992 Supreme Court judgment.
The census will also be the basis for conducting the delimitation exercise for Lok Sabha seats, another controversial process that threatens to drive a wedge between northern and southern India, as well as usher in the reservation of a third of all seats in national and state legislatures for women.
The Congress on Sunday claimed that the notification is silent on the inclusion of caste in the 16th Census.
“The much-touted Gazette Notification on the 16th Census to be conducted in late 2026/early 2027 has just been issued. It is quite a damp squib and merely repeats what had already been announced on April 30, 2025. It is entirely because of the persistence and insistence of the Indian National Congress that the PM surrendered to the demand for a caste census. He had called Congress leaders as urban Naxals for making this demand. Both in Parliament and in the Supreme Court, the Modi Govt had rejected the very idea of a caste census – which it announced 47 days back. Today’s Gazette Notification is, however, SILENT on the inclusion of caste in the 16th Census. Is this yet another U-turn by the ustad of U-turns? Or will details be announced later?” Congress leader Jairam Ramesh said.
“The INC firmly believes that the 16th Census must adopt the Telangana model for not just caste enumeration but also bringing out detailed data information on socio-economic parameters caste-wise,” he added.