The Central government has asked all states and Union Territories (UT) to carry out all the changes in the boundaries of administrative jurisdictions before December 31 this year, after which they will be considered final for the census exercise set to commence on April 1, 2026.
Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India Mritunjay Kumar Narayan sent a letter to all states and UTs stating that for the census, all villages and towns will be divided into uniform enumeration blocks and for each block, an enumerator is assigned to avoid any miss or repetition during the population count. The census can only be administered three months after freezing the boundary limits of the administrative units.
The Census Exercise
Narayan said that from April 1, 2026, “the Houselisting Operation, the appointment of supervisors and enumerators and the work division among them will be done, and on February 1, 2027, the Census of the population will begin.”
The 16th census of India will also include a caste census. According to officials, the states have already constituted Census Coordination Committees (CCCs) under the respective chief secretaries. The committee includes various departments like revenue, local administration, municipal corporations, rural development and panchayats, planning education, etc for conducting and monitoring different phases of Census.
Timeline of the Census
Boundaries of administrative units will be frozen on December 31, 2025. The census exercise will commence on April 1, 2026 with Houselisting Operations (HLOs) during which the data about housing conditions, assets and amenities of each household will be collected. The next phase involving population enumeration will begin on February 1, 2027 that will include data on demographic, socio-economic, cultural and other information. The data collection will end by March 1, 2025 after which it will be processed.
Historical Context of the Caste Census
Every census that has been conducted since the first census in 1951 has comprised numbers of members from the Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs) communities. The Central government later permitted the state governments to conduct a separate census for members of the Other Backward Communities (OBC) at their own behest in 1961.
The census of 1931 is the most recent data set available on the basis of caste. However, when the census of 2011 approached, the notion of a caste census was still shaping political discourse. In 2010, Law Minister M Veerappa Moily had requested the then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to include the caste census into the fray. After persistent pressure for the demand, a council of ministers chaired by then Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee directed the Separate Socio Economic Caste Census (SECC). The data collected from the census which was carried out at a cost of Rs 4900 crore is yet to be made public.
