Overview
- Prime Minister Narendra Modi on August 15, 2026 asked young people to spend one or two hours helping families verify and submit Census 2027 details through mobile phones to boost participation and accuracy.
- Census 2027 will for the first time let households self-enumerate using a dedicated mobile app while keeping traditional door-to-door visits as a backup to ensure full coverage.
- The Registrar General has published a 40-question population schedule that asks about education, work, migration, family makeup, languages, disability and identity documents.
- Officials have set region-specific windows with self-enumeration for snow-bound and non-synchronous areas open August 17–31 and field counting in those areas scheduled September 1–30, and overall data collection targeted to finish by March 1, 2027.
- The census was delayed from 2021 because of COVID-19 and the move to digital collection is intended to reduce entry errors, speed processing in the field and provide updated data that will take two to three years to collate and publish for policy use.