Union cabinet approves 2027 census with ₹11,718 crore budget
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New Delhi: The Union cabinet has officially approved the proposal to conduct the long-delayed national census at a projected cost of ₹11,718.24 crore.
Following a meeting chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday, the government announced that the exercise—originally due in 2021—will now take place in two phases between 2026 and 2027. Approximately three million 'field functionaries' will be deployed to carry out the massive undertaking, which will be India's first fully digital census.
To facilitate this shift, data collection will be managed through mobile applications available on Android and iOS platforms, while a new ‘Census Management & Monitoring System’ portal will oversee operations in real-time. While the move to digital raises questions regarding data privacy, the cabinet's communiqué assured that "suitable security features have been provisioned for this mammoth digital operation".
The census will be conducted in two distinct stages. Its first phase, the houselisting and housing census, will take place between April and September 2026. The second, population enumeration phase will take place in February 2027, except in Ladakh and in the ‘snow-bound non-synchronous areas’ of Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, where it will be conducted in September 2026.
The cabinet confirmed that caste will be enumerated electronically during the second phase. The project is expected to generate significant temporary employment, engaging a workforce of 18,600 technical personnel for approximately 550 days at local levels. The government noted this would create around 10.2 million person-days of work, potentially boosting the future employability of staff through experience in digital data handling.
Notably, Friday's press release did not mention a separate budgetary allocation for the National Population Register (NPR), a precursor to the National Register of Citizens (NRC). This marks a departure from 2019, when the government had allocated ₹3,941.35 crore for the NPR.
The 16th decadal census, initially postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, will now take place an unprecedented 15 years after the previous 2011 exercise.