Centre issues Census notification, to be held in two phases
Registrar General of India
(RGI) on Monday issued a notification for conducting India's 16th census with
caste enumeration
in 2027. Top sources have indicated that the primary focus of the exercise will be on capturing caste, rather than class. Each person may have to mention his/her religion and caste, they added.
Sources suggested there is no unified single list of Other Backward Classes (OBCs) as it varies from state to state as one caste may be under OBC category in one state and in the general category in another. "And there are two separate lists of OBCs maintained -- one by the Centre and another by the state," a top official added.
The census would include a variety of questions to find out economic disparity so that this census could be used for selecting beneficiaries for various centrally-sponsored welfare schemes and may replace the Socio-Economic Caste Census (SECC) 2011, according to multiple people involved in the exercise. There are also indications that preparation of a detailed questionnaire could start as early as next month. According to the RGI notification, the census will be carried out with a reference date of October 1, 2026 in snow-bound areas like Ladakh and March 1, 2027 in the rest of the country.
"The reference date for the said census shall be 00.00 hours of March 1, 2027, except for the Union territory of Ladakh and snow-bound non-synchronous areas of the Union territory of Jammu and Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand," it said. The massive exercise will be carried out by around 34 lakh enumerators and supervisors and around 1.3 lakh census functionaries armed with digital devices. A provision for self-enumeration would also be made available.
The census will be conducted in two phases. In phase one -
Houselisting Operation
- the housing conditions, assets and amenities of each household will be collected. In the second phase -
Population Enumeration
- the demographic, socio-economic, cultural and other details of every person in each household will be collected.
Stringent
data security measures
would be followed to ensure data security at the time of collection, transmission and storage, according to the home ministry officials.
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