The Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India, Mritunjay Kumar Narayan, has reassured the public that individual data collected during the upcoming census will remain confidential and cannot be used for any purpose other than statistical aggregation.
A special dedicated web portal will be launched for self-enumeration during the upcoming Census, which will be available for both phases of the national enumeration exercise, officials said Monday.
'There will be not less than 31 lakh people working in the census process.'
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 notification said.
While data can empower communities, it reinforces identities, making local politics more caste-centric, with decisions increasingly contested on the grounds of representation.
Such dynamics could lead to shifting alliances and, in the worst case, local governance getting paralysed as each group demands proportional power-sharing, explain Amitabh Kundu and Mehebub Rahaman.
According to norms, census can be conducted only three months after the freezing of boundary limits of administrative units such as districts, sub-districts, tehsils, talukas and police stations.
Inaugurating the 'Janganana Bhawan', the office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India, Shah said census is a process that may form the basis of development agenda.
The team also visited Tizit Police Station to meet the cross section of the society including civilians, police personnel and doctors who treated the injured for obtaining valuable information, he said.
Although the Disaster Management Act for Covid containment measures, considered a hindrance in conducting the census, was withdrawn in March this year the Centre has not taken any further action on conducting the much-delayed population enumeration.
'The COVID-19 threat is still looming large. The census and NPR are not in the priority list of the government as of now'
Only 4.5 per cent of the population in the country is educated upto the level of graduate or above while a majority of 32.6 per cent population is not even educated upto the primary school level.
Rajasthan Chief Secretary D B Gupta said he and the representatives of a few other states raised objections to a few questions to be asked by enumerators during the NPR exercise. He said the central government officials told them that answers to all such questions are not mandatory.
© 2026 Rediff.com - Advertise with us - Disclaimer - Privacy Policy - Sitemap - Feedback - About us - Terms of use - Grievances