The long-awaited population census, which will include caste enumeration for the first time, will be conducted in two phases — the first between April and September 2026 and the second in February 2027 — the Union home ministry informed Lok Sabha on Tuesday.
Giving details of the exercise in response to a question by leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi, junior home minister Nityanand Rai said Phase I will include house listing and housing census, followed by Phase II population enumeration.
The first phase, from April to September 2026, will be conducted within 30 days in accordance with the convenience of state and Union Territory governments.
“Population enumeration will be done in February 2027 with reference date 00:00 hours of 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, where it will be done in September 2026 with reference date 00.00 hours of 1st October, 2026,” the minister said.
Population censuses are supposed to take place every 10 years, but there hasn’t been any since 2011.
Responding to another question from Rahul on whether the government plans to publish the draft questions and seek inputs from people or their representatives, Rai said the census questionnaire was finalised based on inputs and suggestions from different ministries, departments, organisations and census data users before each exercise.
He said the office of the registrar-general and census commissioner of India was in the process of finalising the questionnaire for the Census 2027.
The census, he said, has a history of more than 150 years, and lessons from previous exercises are taken into consideration for conducting the next census.
Rai said caste enumeration will also be done in the census as decided by the cabinet committee on political affairs on April 30. The minister said that Census 2027 will be conducted digitally and data will be collected through mobile apps, along with the online provision for self-enumeration.
Some 34 lakh enumerators and supervisors and around 1.3 lakh census functionaries will be deployed.
