Union minister Ashwini Vaishnaw.
Credit: PTI Photo
New Delhi: Setting the stage for what is described as the world’s largest administrative and statistical exercise, the Centre on Friday cleared a budget of Rs 11,718.24 crore for conducting the 2027 Census.
The Union Cabinet, chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, approved the proposal to conduct the Census which will be the first digital exercise of its kind, Information and Broadcasting Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw told reporters here.
The Census will be conducted in two phases -- house-listing and housing census from April to September, 2026; and population enumeration (PE) in February 2027.
For Ladakh and snow-bound non-synchronous areas of the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir and states of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, the PE exercise shall be conducted in September, 2026, he said.
The Census 2027 will also capture caste data electronically in the PE phase, Vaishnaw said.
About 30 lakh field functionaries will complete this gigantic exercise of national importance.
Use of a mobile app for data collection and the central portal for monitoring purposes will ensure better quality data, Vaishnaw said.
Data dissemination will be much better and in a user-friendly way so that all queries on required parameters for policy-making will be available with a click of a button, he said.
Census-as-a-Service (CaaS) will deliver data to ministries in a clean, machine-readable and actionable format, he said.
Several new initiatives taken for the Census 2027 including data will be collected using mobile applications that will be available for both Android as well as iOS versions, a dedicated portal namely Census Management & Monitoring System (CMMS) portal has been developed for managing and monitoring the entire census process on a real time basis. Another innovation for Census 2027 is HLB Creator web map application to be used by the charge officers.
Option to self-enumerate will be provided to the public, suitable security features have been provisioned for this mammoth digital operation, said a statement.
Efforts will also be made to disseminate Census Results with more customized visualization tools. Data sharing to all, up to the lowest Administrative Unit i.e. Village/Ward level, the statement said.
To complete various tasks for successful conduct of Census 2027, approximately 18,600 technical manpower will be engaged for about 550 days at the local levels. Total 1.02 crore man-days employment would be generated, the statement added..