Cabinet Approves Conduct of 2027 Census at Cost of Rs 11,718 Crore
The Wire Staff
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New Delhi: Following a meeting chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Union cabinet on Friday (December 12) approved the conduct of the next census at a cost of Rs 11,718.24 crore.
Some 30 lakh ‘field functionaries’ will be deployed to complete the long-overdue exercise, which is to be the first of its kind in India to be conducted using digital means, the cabinet said in a statement.
Mobile applications for data collection will be available on Android and iOS app marketplaces and a ‘Census Management & Monitoring System portal’ has been developed to oversee the exercise in real-time, the cabinet said.
That the census will be conducted digitally raises questions on whether the data the government collects over the two-phase exercise will be stored safely. The cabinet's communique Friday contained a brief bullet point saying “suitable security features have been provisioned for this mammoth digital operation”.
Caste will be enumerated electronically during the second, population enumeration phase of the exercise as the cabinet had announced in April, it noted on Friday.
A workforce of 18,600 technical personnel “will be engaged for about 550 days at the local levels”, generating around 1.02 crore person-days of employment and helping with the “future employment prospects of these persons” given that the job will involve “digital data handling, monitoring and coordination”, the cabinet said.
Friday's press release did not speak of a separate budgetary allocation for a National Population Register – the first step towards the creation of a country-wide National Register of Citizens – unlike in 2019, when the government had allocated it Rs 3,941.35 crore, The Hindu noted.
Due in 2020, the 16th decadal census was postponed initially due to the COVID-19 pandemic and later for unknown reasons.
Its first phase, the houselisting and housing census, will take place between April and September 2026.
The second, population enumeration phase will take place in February 2027, except in Ladakh and in the ‘snow-bound non-synchronous areas’ of Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, where it will be conducted in September 2026.
This will make the gap between the first phase of the 2011 census and that of the upcoming exercise an unprecedented 15 years.
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