Houselisting For Census 2026 Set To Start On April 1

In a letter to chief secretaries of states and Union territories, census commissioner and registrar-general of India Mrityunjay Kumar Narayan made the announcement and said before that the appointment of supervisors, enumerators and work distribution among them shall be done with cooperation from states and district administration.

On February 1, 2027, the census of the population will begin.

The census is a two-phase exercise -- in phase one, beginning April 1, 2026, i.e., the house listing operation (HLO), the housing conditions, assets and amenities of each household will be collected.

Subsequently, in the second phase, i.e., population enumeration (PE), the demographic, socio-economic, cultural and other details of every person in each household will be collected, which is scheduled for February 1, 2027.

In the census, caste enumeration will also be done, a government statement had said. For census activities, over 34-lakh enumerators and supervisors and around 1.3 lakh functionaries will be deployed.

The forthcoming exercise is the 16th census till now and the eighth after Independence, with the last being conducted in 2011. It will be conducted through digital means using mobile applications. Provision of self-enumeration will also be made available to the people.

The Office of the registrar-general and census commissioner had prepared around three dozen questions to be asked to the citizens.

The survey will ask households about ownership of items like phones, internet, vehicles (bicycle, scooter, motorcycle, car, jeep, van) and appliances (radio, TV, and transistor), among others.

The citizens will also be asked about cereal consumption, sources of drinking water and lighting, type and access to latrines, wastewater disposal, bathing and kitchen facilities, fuel used for cooking and LPG/PNG connection.

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

The Centre has also asked states and Union territories to make any proposed changes in the boundaries of administrative units before December 31, when they will be considered final for the census exercise.

The registrar-general said that for the census, all villages and towns are divided into uniform enumeration blocks and for each block, an enumerator is assigned to avoid any miss or repetition during the population count.

According to norms, the census can be conducted only three months after the freezing of boundary limits of administrative units such as districts, sub-districts, tehsils, talukas and police stations.

Mr Narayan asked all states and UTs to direct all departments to make any proposed changes in the boundaries of municipal corporations, revenue villages, tehsils, sub-divisions or districts before December 31. He asked the states and UTs to ensure that no changes should be made in the boundaries of administrative units between January 1, 2026, and March 31, 2027, during which the census exercise will take place.

Any changes in the existing boundaries must be intimated to the census directorates in the states and Union territories and the registrar-general of India by December 31, 2025, the letter said.

"For Census 2027, boundaries of administrative units will be frozen on December 31, 2025," it said.

To ensure a fair workload for enumerators, an administrative unit is divided into manageable sections for the census called "blocks". A block is a clearly defined area within a village or town on a notional map for census purposes. These are termed "house listing blocks" (HLBs) during the house listing operations and "enumeration blocks" (EBs) during the population enumeration and will serve as the smallest administrative units for the census.

India's 16th Census with caste enumeration will be carried out in 2027 with the reference date of October 1, 2026, in snowbound areas like Ladakh and March 1, 2027, in the rest of the country.

Very stringent data security measures will be kept in place to ensure data security at the time of collection, transmission and storage, the statement had said.

The reference date for Population Census – 2027 will be 00:00 hours of the first day of March 2027. For the Union territory of Ladakh and the non-synchronous snowbound 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, a notification had said.