Census 2027 Goes Digital: Government Announces Self-Enumeration Option, Two-Phase Exercise, Caste Data Collection and Strict Confidentiality Under Census Law

Census 2027 will officially start to be conducted from April 1, 2026. The Government of India has confirmed that the upcoming Census 2027 will transition to a digital format. In a significant first for the country, citizens will have the option to enumerate themselves through a dedicated web portal. The upcoming census will be the 16th Census in the series and 8th since India’s independence. Long overdue since 2021, it was stalled keeping in mind the global Covid-19 pandemic crisis. 

Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India Mritunjay Kumar Narayan, informed the media on March 30, 2026, that India's 2027 Census will be a fully digital exercise conducted in two main phases. He further said that during the first phase, citizens will have the option to fill out their own census details using an online portal that will be available in 16 languages. 

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Caste Data Collection Planned, Government Assures Strict Privacy Safeguards

Narayan also informed that the second phase of the census will focus on gathering broader population details, including caste enumeration, and the specific questions for this round will be published closer to its start date. To make this massive national exercise run smoothly, census workers will use a mobile app instead of paper forms to collect information in the field. The entire operation, including the mapping of specific geographic blocks for house counting, will be closely managed and tracked using dedicated web portals and digital mapping applications.

Notably, this information was also detailed in the Lok Sabha on March 24, 2026, by the Minister of State in the Ministry of Home Affairs, Nityanand Rai. He was responding to an unstarred question raised by G Kumar Naik (MP, Raichur, Karnataka) regarding the digital methods and data safeguards planned for the upcoming population count.

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The query also raised concerns regarding whether Census data would be linked to other databases like Aadhaar, the National Population Register (NPR), or voter rolls, and if it could be used for citizenship verification or surveillance. In response, the Government emphasized strict privacy protocols. 

Nityanand Rai clarified that the Census is conducted entirely under the provisions of the Census Act, 1948, and the Census Rules, 1990. Under these legal frameworks, individual data collected during the Census is kept completely confidential. The Government assured that only aggregated data at various administrative levels is ever published.

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