The 2027 national census – arguably the largest administrative and statistical exercise in the world – will run from April 2026 to February 2027 and be conducted with the help of a mobile application for data collection purposes, the government said Friday evening.
The Union Cabinet has cleared Rs 11,718.24 crore in funds for the census, which will be held over two phases – a) house-listing from April to September 2026, and b) population enumeration till February 2027. For Ladakh and snow-bound, non-synchronous areas in Jammu and Kashmir, Uttarakhand, and Himachal Pradesh, the latter will be in September 2026.
Significantly, this census will also include caste enumeration; relevant data will be recorded, electronically, in the second phase, i.e., population enumeration.
An estimated 30 lakh on-ground workers will be needed to complete this mammoth task, and a website set up by the federal government will monitor to ensure high-quality data is captured.
The process will involve census officials – called enumerators, who are usually government schoolteachers, visiting each and every household with detailed questionnaires.
As in the case of BLOs conducting the voter re-verification drives in various states, including Bengal and Tamil Nadu, which vote next year, they will be appointed by the concerned state government and will also hold down their day jobs. Other functionaries – at sub-district, district, and state levels – will also be appointed by state governments.
Once this data is collected and then analysed, dissemination will be improved, i.e., ministries will be provided data, at the click of a button, in a machine-readable and actionable format, making it easier to formulate policies, government sources told NDTV.
The endeavour will also be to make the data available within the shortest possible time.
Among the new initiatives for Census 2027:
- First census by digital means: Data will be collected using mobile applications that will be available for phones running the Android OS or Apple's iOS
- A Census Management & Monitoring System, or CMMS, portal has been developed for managing and monitoring the entire process on a real-time basis
- House-listing Block, or HLB, creator web map application represents another innovation
- People can choose to 'self-enumerate' will be provided to the public
- Suitable security features, to safeguard collected data, have been established
The 2027 census will have a publicity campaign for nationwide awareness, inclusive participation, last-mile engagement, and support for field operations, sources said. It will also emphasise the sharing of accurate, authentic, and timely data to ensure maximum impact.
The census will also have significant employment-generation potential – around 1.02 crore worth of 'man-days', i.e., the number of people to be employed multiplied by the number of hours of work, the government said. This will also result in capacity-building as the job will teach digital data-handling, monitoring, and coordination skills that could help their job prospects.
The 2027 census will be the sixteenth in the country (eighth after independence) and will represent the biggest source of primary data at village-, town-, and ward-levels.
