NEW DELHI: In a first, the next Census data is likely to be collected through a mobile application, officials of Registrar General of India said on Tuesday at the conference of data users to finalise the strategy and questionnaire for the Census 2021.
33 lakh enumerators will be enlisted for the exercise this time, MHA officials said, adding enumerators would be encouraged to use their own phone and they would be appropriately remunerated for this, the Home Ministry said.
Enumerators are people who conduct door to door counting. For the last census which was carried out in 2011, 27 lakh enumerators were enrolled for the exercise.
There is also an option to collect and record the data through paper schedules which will eventually be submitted electronically by them.
The reference date is October 1, 2020, for J&K and snow-bound areas of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand while for the rest of country it is March 1, 2021.
Union Home Secretary Rajiv Gauba said Census is not just an exercise of head count but it also provides invaluable socio-economic data which forms credible basis for informed policy formulation.
Registrar General of India and Census Commissioner Vivek Joshi said the Census 2021 will be conducted in two phases.
In the first phase, house listing operations would be conducted in any two months chosen by the states between April and September in 2020. In the second phase, actual population enumeration would be done during February 2021, followed by the revision round from March 15, 2021.
Gauba said the changing demographics and socio-economic parameters reflected by the census helps in the reformulation of the country’s plans for the economic development and welfare schemes.
Census in numbers
Two phases