On Wednesday, India officially kicked off the largest population enumeration exercise in global history, marking the first full national population count the country has conducted in over 15 years. What began as a routine decennial survey scheduled for 2021 was delayed first by the COVID-19 pandemic, and later pushed back further by administrative and electoral logistics — the first time India has missed its decennial census schedule in modern history.
When complete, this 12-month, two-phase initiative will have counted every single one of India’s more than 1.4 billion residents, carried out by a team of more than 3 million trained enumerators across 36 states and union territories, covering more than 640,000 villages, 9,700 towns and 7,000 sub-districts. Most field workers are drawn from existing public sector ranks, including schoolteachers, local government officials and state administrative staff.
Today, India holds the title of the world’s most populous country, having overtaken China in total population in 2023 according to United Nations Population Fund estimates. Even with gradually falling national fertility rates, the country retains its status as one of the world’s youngest major nations, with a median population age of just 28 and nearly 70 percent of its population falling within the working-age bracket.
This 16th national census, the eighth conducted since India gained independence from British colonial rule in 1947, marks a major milestone in the evolution of the country’s data collection efforts. For the first time ever, the entire operation will leverage digital infrastructure: enumerators will use custom mobile applications to collect and submit data in real time, and authorities have introduced a new self-enumeration option that allows residents to submit their own details via a multilingual online portal that generates a unique verification ID for census workers to confirm.
The rollout will proceed in staggered phases. An initial pilot launch across selected regions including Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Delhi, Goa, Karnataka, Mizoram and Odisha will open with self-enumeration running from April 1 to April 15, followed by the first national phase of data collection: the House Listing and Housing Census, to be completed between April 16 and May 15 in these pilot areas. This first phase of the national operation gathers 33 core points of data covering housing type, access to basic amenities, household assets and household structure, covering questions ranging from roofing material to primary cereal consumption to internet access and the number of married couples residing in a single home. The second phase, full population enumeration scheduled for February 2027, will collect granular demographic data on education, migration history, fertility rates, and for the first time in decades, will include full caste enumeration — a long-debated and politically sensitive topic in Indian public life.
The scope and structure of India’s census has evolved steadily since its colonial origins, reflecting shifting administrative and policy priorities across the decades. The first attempted nationwide census in 1872 included just 17 questions, focused almost entirely on recording basic household structure and core identity markers such as age, religion, caste and occupation. The first fully synchronized nationwide census followed in 1881, establishing a core template of identity markers, social classifications, and basic questions around literacy and disability. Over the early 20th century, questions on occupation, language and literacy were refined to capture more nuanced details, including secondary employment and economic dependency. By 1941, the survey had expanded to 22 questions, shifting from purely identity tracking to capturing how Indians lived, adding new metrics for fertility, employment status, economic dependency, migration and job search that signaled a growing policy focus on economic outcomes.
After independence, the scope expanded further: the 1951 and 1961 censuses added questions on nationality, displacement from the 1947 Partition, land ownership and expanded employment categories. From the 1970s onward, the census adopted an explicitly socio-economic focus, adding standard questions on migration history, duration of residence, detailed fertility patterns and granular employment classifications. The 2001 and 2011 rounds adapted to India’s rapid modernization, adding tracking for commuting patterns, distinctions between marginal and full-time work, school attendance and more detailed disability and fertility data. The 2026 round continues this evolution, updating social classifications to recognize changing relationship norms: couples in live-in relationships may now be recorded as married if they self-identify their relationship as a stable union, a quiet shift toward acknowledging evolving social realities across the country.
As the scope of data collection has expanded, so too have public and expert concerns over data use and potential misapplication. Some analysts note that prior efforts to build centralized national databases including the National Population Register, alongside intensive revisions to national electoral rolls, have stoked public anxieties that population counting could be tied to citizenship verification and exclusion.
“Although the census has nothing to do with citizenship, this can create anxiety, prompting some families to over-report or list absent migrant members during the census to avoid any perceived exclusion,” explained KS James, an Indian demographer affiliated with Princeton University.
Beyond these public concerns, experts emphasize a more fundamental policy gap that the census is set to address: for 15 years, India has crafted national policy without an updated full population baseline. In the absence of a fresh enumeration, policymakers have relied on sample surveys to track everything from consumption expenditure to labor force trends, with the national statistics ministry working to maintain broad representativeness, but gaps remain.
For Ashwini Deshpande, an economist at Ashoka University, the census does more than count people: it updates the basic geographic and social map of India itself, reclassifying areas as rural, urban or the fast-growing peri-urban category that has emerged alongside rapid economic growth. Most current geographic classification still relies on 2011 census data, even though decades of urbanization have blurred traditional boundaries that shape how policy is targeted.
“That has real consequences for India’s vast welfare and public spending system,” Deshpande noted. If program eligibility relies on outdated or inaccurate geographic and population data, the number of eligible beneficiaries can be wildly misjudged, distorting service and fund delivery. For example, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, the country’s flagship rural jobs scheme, depends on accurate definitions of which areas count as rural — a classification that has shifted dramatically across 15 years of rapid development.
Without up-to-date full population data, millions of urban migrant workers, most of whom work in informal sectors and live in informal housing, remain undercounted in policy design — a gap that was starkly exposed during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic when millions of workers were left without access to state support.
“This census is crucial — it is the definitive snapshot of India, capturing everything from caste and religion to jobs, education and amenities, and offering the most complete picture of how the population lives,” Deshpande said.