Census 2027: Centre asks states to finalise administrative boundaries by Dec 31

NEw new delhi: The Centre has asked the states and unification territories to do any proposed changes in the boundaries of administrative jurisdictions before dec 31, 2025, when they testament freeze for the Census-2027 exercise and the first phase of the decadal population count will begin on April 1 next year, according to a communication sent by the registrar general and census commissioner of India, Mritunjay Kumar Narayan, on June 27.The freezing means the states/UTs won’t be able to change the boundaries of districts, towns, villages and tehsils post December 31. The Census can be conducted only three months after the freezing of boundary limits of administrative units.For the Census, all villages and towns are divided into uniform enumeration blocks and for each block, an enumerator is assigned to avoid any miss or repetition during the population count.“From April 1, 2026, the Houselisting Operation, the appointment of supervisors and enumerators and the work division among them will be done, and on February 1, 2027, the Census of the population will begin. It is important that once enumeration blocks are finalised, boundaries of administrative units are not changed,” Narayan said in his letter to all the chief secretaries.He asked them to direct all the departments “to make any proposed changes in the boundaries of municipal corporations, revenue villages, tehsils, sub-divisions or districts before December 31”.“The states/UTs should ensure that no changes should be made in the boundaries of administrative units between January 1, 2026, and March 31, 2027, during which Census exercise will take place. Any changes in the existing boundaries must be intimated to Census directorates in the states and UTs and Registrar General of India by December 31, 2025. For Census 2027, boundaries of administrative units will be frozen on December 31, 2025,” the letter added.To ensure a fair workload for enumerators, an administrative unit is divided into manageable sections for the Census called “blocks”. A block is a clearly defined area within a village or town on a notional map for census purposes.These are termed houselisting blocks (HLBs) during houselisting operations and enumeration blocks (EBs) during Population Enumeration (PE) and serve as the smallest administrative units for the Census.According to Narayan’s letter, the houselisting operations for the Census will begin from April 1, 2026, marking the start of the first phase of the decennial exercise. “Before that, the appointment of supervisors, enumerators and work distribution among them shall be done with cooperation from states and district administration,” the letter stated.The Centre announced earlier this month that the 16th Census will finally be carried out after a gap of 16 years.“....the Central government hereby declares that a census of the population of India shall be taken during the year 2027. The reference date for the said census shall be 00.00 hours of the 1st day of March, 2027, except for the union territory of Ladakh and snow-bound non-synchronous areas of the union territory of Jammu and Kashmir and the states of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand”, said the notification issued by the Office of Registrar General of India or ORGI on June 16.The much-delayed Census, which will include caste enumeration, will be completed by March 1, 2027. Officials have said that while the data collection would be over by March 1, 2027, the entire exercise to collate the data and publish it will take two to three more years.On preparatory activities already done, officials said that all the states have already constituted Census Coordination Committees (CCCs) under the respective chief secretaries. “As the Census exercise was originally to take place in 2020, ORGI had already written to states/UTs for forming CCCs in April 2019,” said an officer, adding that the committees have various departments like revenue, local administration, municipal corporations, rural development and panchayats, planning education, etc for conducting and monitoring different phases of Census.Also, the pre-test for Census - which is conducted prior to each Census encompassing all facets to check feasibility of all questions, methodologies, logistics arrangements, processing of data, etc - was also done in 2019.The ministry of home affairs has said that the 16th Census will see involvement of about 34 lakh enumerators and supervisors. Besides, it said, around 1.3 lakh Census functionaries would be deployed for the exercise. It also said that the upcoming census “will be conducted through digital means using mobile applications” and “provision of self-enumeration would also be made available to the people”.The 16th Census will be conducted in two phases. In phase one i.e. House-listing operation (HLO), the housing conditions, assets and amenities of each household will be collected. Subsequently, in the second phase i.e. Population enumeration (PE), the demographic, socio-economic, cultural and other details of every person in each household will be collected.