Cabinet approves Rs 11,718 crore for India’s first digital Census in 2027

The Union Cabinet has approved Rs 11,718 crore for India’s first fully digital Census, scheduled in two phases from April 2026 to February 2027. The exercise will include electronic caste data collection and deploy nearly 30 lakh field staff using mobile app-based systems

New Delhi: Union minister Ashwini Vaishnaw on Friday said the government has approved Rs 11,718 crore for the conduct of the Census of India 2027.

The Union Cabinet, at a meeting chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, approved the proposal to conduct the Census, which will be the first digital exercise of its kind, Information and Broadcasting Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw told reporters.

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The Census will be conducted in two phases — house-listing and housing census from April to September 2026; and population enumeration (PE) in February 2027. For Ladakh and snow-bound non-synchronous areas of the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir and States of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, the PE exercise shall be conducted in September 2026, he said.

The Census 2027 will also capture caste data electronically in the PE phase, Vaishnaw said. About 30 lakh field functionaries will complete this gigantic exercise of national importance.

Use of a mobile app for data collection and the central portal for monitoring purposes will ensure better quality data, Vaishnaw said. Data dissemination will be much better and in a user-friendly way so that all queries on required parameters for policy-making will be available with a click of a button, he said.

Census-as-a-Service (CaaS) will deliver data to Ministries in a clean, machine-readable, and actionable format, he said.