NEW DELHI: The government on Wednesday announced the schedule for conducting the national census along with the caste enumeration, which will begin on March 1, 2027 in rest of the country besides Union Territories of Ladakh and snow-bound areas of the UT of Jammu & Kashmir and states of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, where the cutoff date will be October 1, 2026.
The exercise is going to be conducted after a delay of seven years, as the decennial census was due to be conducted in 2021, but was postponed due to outbreak of COVID-19 and was subsequently postponed because of technical and administrative issues.
In an official release the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHAS) said, “It has been decided to conduct Population Census-2027 in two phases along with enumeration of castes. The reference date for Population Census - 2027 will be 00:00 hours of the first day of March, 2027.”
It further said that for the UT of Ladakh and the non-synchronous snow-bound areas of the UT of Jammu and Kashmir and States of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, “the reference date will be 00.00 hours of the first day of October, 2026”.
The MHA said, “The notification for the intent of conducting the Population Census with the above reference dates will be published in the official gazette tentatively on June 16, 2025, as per the provisions of section 3 of Census Act 1948.”
The Census of India is conducted under the provisions of the Census Act, 1948 and the Census Rules, 1990.
The last Census of India was conducted in 2011 in two phases – the first one was House Listing (HLO), which was conducted between from April 1 and September 30 of 2010 and the second one Population Enumeration (PE), which was conducted between February 9 to 28 in the year 2011 with reference date of “00:00 hours of the first day of March 2011, except for snow-bound non-synchronous areas of Jammu and Kashmir, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh for which it was conducted between September 11 and 30 2010 with reference date as 00.00 hours of October 1, 2010”.
Census 2021 was also proposed to be conducted in two phases in a similar manner with phase I between April and September 2020 and second phase in February 2021.
“All the preparations for the first phase of the Census to be conducted in 2021 were completed and field work was scheduled to begin in some States/UTs from April 1, 2020. But, due to the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic across the country, the census work was postponed<” the MHA said.
In April, Centre had decided that caste-based enumeration would be part of the next Census, as the decision was announced following a meeting of the cabinet committee on political affairs chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. “The Modi government, committed to social justice, has taken a historic decision today,” Home Minister Amit Shah had said in an X post in Hindi.
After Independence, the country’s population count has been conducted every 10 years since 1951. The census of India was first introduced in India in 1872.
The Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner had prepared 31 questions to be asked to the citizens during the census exercise.
According to the 2011 data, India’s total population was 121 crore, the sex ratio was 940 females per 1,000 males, the literacy rate was 74.04 percent and the population growth was 17.64 percent from 2001 to 2011.