The Union Cabinet has approved ₹11,718 crore for conducting the Census of India 2027, marking the country’s first fully digital population-counting exercise. Union minister Ashwini Vaishnaw announced that the proposal was cleared during a Cabinet meeting chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The Census will rely on mobile-based data collection, digital monitoring, and centralised processing to ensure faster, cleaner, and more accurate demographic data.
The 2027 Census will take place in two phases. The first phase, covering house-listing and the housing census, will be conducted between April and September 2026. The second phase, the population enumeration, will be carried out in February 2027. For Ladakh and the snow-bound regions of Jammu & Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, and Uttarakhand, the population enumeration will take place earlier, in September 2026, due to climatic challenges.
A major feature of the upcoming exercise is the electronic capture of caste data during the population enumeration. This will be the first time caste information is recorded digitally at a national scale. The government will deploy nearly 30 lakh field workers to carry out the exercise, making it one of the largest administrative operations worldwide.
Officials will use a specialised mobile application for data entry, and a central digital portal will allow real-time monitoring of fieldwork. The shift from paper schedules to digital tools is expected to significantly improve data quality, reduce errors, and speed up processing.
The government has also introduced a new framework called Census-as-a-Service (CaaS), which will provide ministries and departments with machine-readable, ready-to-use datasets. Vaishnaw said this will enable quicker policymaking and ensure that data on key socioeconomic indicators can be accessed instantly through user-friendly digital dashboards.
