For it will not just collect data on the Indian population but could provide policymakers with vital clues to issues concerning Gen Z – namely, education, unemployment, and underemployment – and help them meet a major challenge looming on the horizon.

With the recent nationwide stir over the NEET paper leak primarily driven by Gen Z - those born between 1997 and 2012 - the focus is now firmly on India’s youth. About 65% of India’s population is below the age of 65 years.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in his Independence Day speech, highlighted the importance of the Census and appealed to young Indians to leverage digital self-registration via mobile phones, explaining that flawless demographic data secured through active citizen participation forms the foundational bedrock for crafting precise developmental blueprints and effective national policies. 

"The more perfectly accurate information you provide digitally, the more massive the help will be for the country to rapidly move forward," Modi said, adding that the resolution of a Viksit Bharat will only be truly fulfilled when massive development successfully reaches the very last person.

Digital Census Drive

Urging young citizens to actively spearhead this digital Census drive, the Prime Minister firmly advised the youth to sit with their families, meticulously fill out forms to eliminate manual errors, and seamlessly upload the flawless data online. "I strongly urge the youth of my country to actively and heavily join in this incredibly important work of the digital Census," the Prime Minister said.

From the point of view of policymaking, the Census enables the government to frame targeted poverty alleviation programmes and cut the food subsidy bill by removing persons from the list of beneficiaries who do not deserve free ration. 

Similarly, Census data will also help the government in fine-tuning a host of social sector schemes like PM Kisan Samman Nidhi, Atal Pension Yojana, Ayushman Bharat Yojana, Atal Vayo Abhyuday Yojana, and Vishwakarma Yojana, etc., for better results. 

The Census 2027 exercise is now all set to enter the crucial second phase, during which the headcount exercise will be done along with the collection of socio-economic data of individuals through a set of 40 questions, which were recently notified by the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), including employment status, Aadhaar Number, Driving Licence, Voters’ ID, and others.

Much water has flowed under the bridge since the last such statistical count in 2011.

This time, there is a set of new inclusions related to caste and subheads like names and other particulars of a respondent’s parents.

A Set Of 40 Questions

Among the many issues, the question with regard to caste has become an issue of greater debate among politicians and statisticians, with opposition parties alleging that the government has taken a “complete U-turn” from its 30 April 2025 announcement, and Census experts claiming that the data generated would prove to be a statistician’s nightmare at the tabulation stage.

The Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India (RG&CCI), through the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), on August 14 notified a set of 40 questions to be asked during the Population Enumeration phase, adding 11 questions or data fields that were not part of the Census 2011 questionnaire. The Census 2011 had 29 questions.

The questions that have been added for the first time seek information on the spouse’s name, nationality, father’s particulars and mother’s particulars, digital literacy, permanent residential address, place of COVID-19 vaccination, number of bank accounts, passport number, driving licence availability, and mobile, Aadhaar and voter ID numbers, if available.

For many the additional questions mirror those proposed to be recorded while updating the National Population Register (NPR) in 2019. The NPR exercise was opposed by several opposition parties, which argued that it could be the first step towards the creation of a National Register of Citizens (NRC).

Stirring Controversy 

A former Deputy Registrar General of India, on condition of anonymity, said a few of the 40 questions notified by the MHA may be intended to gather information for the NPR. He was of the view that the notified questions seeking details such as respondents’ names, parents’ names and particulars, and parents’ addresses are unlikely to generate meaningful Census data because they do not appear to be designed for statistical tabulation.

Pronab Sen, Former Secretary of Ministry of Statistics & Programme Implementation (MoSPI) and the government of India’s Chief Statistician, while speaking to The Secretariat, said keeping an open-ended ‘caste’ column means risking and compromising the Census data. “As a statistician, I must say that for the purity of data, there should have been only one column, “SC/ST/OBC/Others”. Only this way, Census officials could better tabulate and present the data for future use,” he noted.

Sen said there are over 4 million castes and sub-castes in the country and when in 2011 the socio-economic survey was conducted, “we were not able to separate them in any meaningful numbers”. He said, “This debate took place earlier also, and suggestions had emerged that attempts should be made to collect entries only through SC/ST/OBC/Others and not through specific caste categories.”

However, officials associated with the Census told The Secretariat that although an individual’s OBC status would not be captured during population enumeration, the digital nature of the exercise, combined with the availability of advanced AI-driven tools, could help statisticians arrive at an aggregate estimate of the population belonging to specific castes.

However, discrepancies could arise if respondents provide different spellings for the same caste, or if a religious sect is entered as a caste, either because of ignorance or inadequate understanding of the caste system, they said.

Officials said the decision on which spellings should be treated as valid for a particular caste category will have to be taken by the government and the Census authorities at a later stage.

The caste Census will make it possible to examine the social, economic, and educational indicators of individual caste groups. But at the same time, officials caution that members of a particular caste could deliberately understate their income or other socio-economic indicators in an attempt to portray the community as “backward” and strengthen its claim for inclusion in the OBC category.

How To Tackle Discrepancies

Officials, however, said statisticians would be able to identify potentially misleading or manipulated information through cross-checking, comparison of values and other indicators. If discrepancies are found to exceed permissible limits, the information could be classified as “unreliable” and therefore unsuitable for use in policy formulation.

An official, explaining the key difference between the Socio-Economic and Caste Census (SECC) conducted in 2011 and caste information being collected as part of Census 2027, said the latter provides complete confidentiality regarding an individual’s caste declaration. Under the Census Act, individual-level information cannot be used as “legal evidence” for determining government benefits or for public disclosure.  

The second major difference is that the earlier difficulty of compiling and separating caste data can now be addressed through AI-powered technological solutions, he said.

During discussions on the population-enumeration questionnaire, officials considered categorising non-SC and non-ST respondents into “general” and providing a dropdown option for OBC status. The proposal, however, was not considered practical because the Central and state OBC lists do not always correspond.

The Central list is prepared on the basis of recommendations and maintained by the National Commission for Backward Classes, whereas the respective state backward classes commission is responsible for its state list. “Since the two lists do not completely overlap, the question for Census authorities was which list should be followed - the Central or the state list. Even within a state, the OBC lists maintained by the Centre and the state government differ,” the official noted.