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India begins first digital census for population and house listing since 2011
The last census done in 2011 revealed a population of 1.21 billion. This year, data will also be collected using mobile apps, available on both Android and iOS versions
- PUBLISHED: Wed 1 Apr 2026, 5:58 PM
The first phase of the world’s largest population census exercise began in India on Wednesday, with 11 states and union territories involved in the ‘house listing’ process. India’s 16th census (Census of India 2027) is also the first to be conducted digitally with an option for self-enumeration.
Mritunjay Kumar Narayan, registrar general and census commissioner of India, told the media that the census data is confidential. “Only aggregate data is released; an individual’s data cannot be shared with states or even the judiciary and does not also come under the purview of the Right to Information Act (RTI),” he said.
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The ‘house listing’ and ‘housing census’ process, will run for a month. It will involve listing all buildings and structures and collecting information about housing conditions, amenities and assets. Buildings will also be geo-tagged and a unique identification number will be assigned to each structure.
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The self-enumeration exercise is a secure, web-based feature and citizens will be able to directly enter details online in 16 languages before the door-to-door survey begins.
The last census in the country was done in 2011, which revealed a population of 1.21 billion. India’s first census by digital means will see data being collected using mobile applications, available for both Android and iOS versions.
About three million field functionaries will be deployed for data collection and for other related operations. They will be spread across 7,000 sub-districts, more than 9,700 towns and almost 640,000 villages across the country.
For the first time, they will collect and submit data through a mobile application on smartphones. Residents can also submit details online through a self-enumeration portal in 16 languages including Hindi and English. They can log in using their mobile phones, fill in the details and get a unique self-enumeration ID, which is to be shared with the official visiting their home.
Residents will have to answer 33 questions during the survey. It will also include caste data. India has a population of over 1.4 billion people and a majority (over 70 per cent) are people in the working age. The mean age in India is 28.
