NEW DELHI – Nearly three years after its originally scheduled launch, India has kicked off the world’s most extensive national population enumeration exercise, a sweeping data-gathering effort that stands to reshape everything from targeted social welfare programming to legislative representation across the South Asian nation.
The 2011 national census pegged India’s population at 1.21 billion. Updated demographic estimates now place the country’s total population above 1.4 billion, confirming India as the world’s most populous nation, a title held by China for decades. Planners initially scheduled the new enumeration for 2021, but public health risks from the COVID-19 pandemic and unforeseen logistical hurdles forced a multi-year postponement.
The massive counting effort is being rolled out in two distinct phases across India’s diverse 28 states and eight union territories. The first phase, which launched this week, will run through September, with field enumerators spending roughly four weeks in every local administrative area to document housing infrastructure, residential conditions and access to basic public utilities. Unlike past paper-only censuses, this year’s exercise combines traditional door-to-door in-person surveys with a new digital self-reporting option: residents can submit their information via a multilingual smartphone app that integrates satellite mapping technology to improve geographic accuracy.
The second phase, scheduled to run from September through the first of April next year, will collect far more granular demographic and socioeconomic data, including religious affiliation and caste identity. In total, more than 3 million trained government workers will be deployed across the country over the 12-month enumeration period. For comparison, the 2011 census relied on roughly 2.7 million enumerators to collect data from more than 240 million households nationwide.
A defining and highly anticipated feature of this new census is the expanded caste enumeration planned for the second phase. For the first time in independent India’s history, the government will attempt to count all caste groups across the country, going far beyond the limited enumeration of historically marginalized communities that has been standard since 1951.
Caste, an ancient hierarchical social system deeply rooted across much of Indian society, particularly within Hindu communities, continues to shape social standing, access to education, economic opportunity, and eligibility for government-mandated affirmative action programs today. Hundreds of distinct caste groups are defined by traditional occupation and socioeconomic status across the country, but modern India has never held a full national enumeration of these groups, leaving policymakers working with outdated, incomplete data. The last full national caste count conducted through a census took place in 1931, when India was still under British colonial rule. Since India’s first post-independence census in 1951, national enumerators have only counted Dalits (Scheduled Castes) and Adivasis (Scheduled Tribes), the two most disadvantaged groups that are legally entitled to targeted government welfare and reservation benefits.
Successive national governments have resisted calls for a full caste enumeration for decades, with opponents arguing that a full count could exacerbate existing social divisions and fuel inter-caste unrest. But growing grassroots pressure from lower-caste advocacy groups pushed the current government to approve the expanded count for the 2021 (now 2024) enumeration.
Beyond caste data, the aggregate population numbers collected through the census carry far-reaching implications for India’s political landscape. Census data forms the foundational dataset for distributing national funding for welfare programs and designing a wide range of public policies, from infrastructure development to public health planning. It will also almost certainly trigger a nationwide redrawing of India’s legislative electoral map, as the number of seats allocated to each state in the lower house of Parliament and state legislative assemblies is adjusted to reflect recent population growth. This redistricting will intersect with a 2023 national law that reserves one-third of all legislative seats for women, meaning any expansion in total seats will directly increase the number of positions reserved for female representatives across all levels of government.