First phase of Census with Houselisting ops from April 1, 2026

The Census is a two-phase exercise -- in phase one i.e. Houselisting Operation (HLO), the housing conditions, assets and amenities of each household will be collected.

New Delhi: The houselisting operations or the first phase of the much delayed Census exercise will kickstart on April 1 next year while the population enumeration will begin on February 1, 2027.

Administrative boundaries will be frozen on December 31 this year, disallowing any state or Union Territory to change the boundaries of its municipalities, panchayats, talukas, police stations, sub-districts and districts, among others, between January 1 next year and March 31, 2027.

Registrar General of India Mrityunjay Kumar Narayan has conveyed these decisions in a letter to Chief Secretaries of states and Union Territories.

The appointment of supervisors, enumerators and work distribution among them should be done with cooperation from states and district administration before the Houselisting Operations and Housing Census.

During the first phase, details of the housing conditions, assets and amenities of each household will be collected while during population enumeration, demographic, socio-economic, cultural and other details of every person in each household will be collected.

Details about ownership of items like phones, internet, vehicles and appliances (radio, TV, transistor), cereal consumption, sources of drinking water and lighting, type of and access to latrines, wastewater disposal, bathing and kitchen facilities, fuel used for cooking and LPG/PNG connection, among others, will be ascertained during the first phase.

Questions in the first phase also include the materials used for the floor, walls and roof of the house, its condition, number of residents, number of rooms, presence of married couples, and whether the household head is a female or belongs to a Scheduled Caste or Tribe.

Rules suggest that the Census can be conducted only three months after the freezing of boundary limits of the administrative units. Boundaries of administrative units to be frozen on Dec 31, 2025 for Census in the boundaries of administrative units between January 1, 2026 and March 31, 2027, Narayan said.

Any changes in the existing boundaries must be intimated to Census Directorates in the states and Union Territories and Registrar General of India by December 31.

This will be the 16th Census, held after a gap of 16 years, and the eighth after independence.

The government had on June 16 issued a notification for conducting the exercise after a gap of 16 years along with caste enumeration for the first time in independent India.

The notification said that the population count will be carried out with a reference date of October 1, 2026 in Ladakh and snow-bound non-synchronous areas of Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand and for the rest of India, it would be March 1, 2027.