Census to get delayed beyond 2025? What Sitharaman’s Union Budget 2025 hints at

If budgetary proposals are anything to go by, the decadal census is unlikely to be carried out in 2025 as well with a meagre Rs 574.80 crore allocated for the exercise in the Budget presented on Saturday.

A meeting of the Union Cabinet on December 24, 2019 had approved the proposal for conducting census of India 2021 at a cost of Rs 8,754.23 crore and updating the National Population Register (NPR) at Rs 3,941.35 crore.

The house listing phase of the census and the exercise to update the NPR were scheduled to be carried out across the country from April 1 to September 30, 2020 but were postponed due to the COVID-19 outbreak.

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The census operation continues to be on hold and the government has not yet announced the new schedule.

The Budget 2025-26, presented by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Saturday, allocated Rs 574.80 crore for Census, Surveys and Statistics/Registrar General of India (RGI), a significant reduction from the Budget 2021-22 when Rs 3,768 crore was allocated, and an indication the decadal exercise may not be carried out even after this significant delay.

The allocation under the head was Rs 572 crore in 2024-25.

According to officials, the entire census and NPR exercise is likely to cost the government more than Rs 12,000 crore.

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This exercise, whenever it happens, will be the first digital census giving the citizens an opportunity to self-enumerate.

The NPR has been made compulsory for citizens who want to exercise the right to fill the census form on their own rather than through government enumerators. For this, the census authority has designed a self-enumeration portal which is yet to be launched.

During self-enumeration, Aadhaar or mobile number will be mandatorily collected.

The Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner had prepared around three dozen questions to be asked to the citizens.

Those questions include whether a family has telephone, internet connection, mobile or smartphone, bicycle, scooter or motorcycle or moped and whether they own a car, jeep or a van.

The citizens will also be asked questions such as the cereal they consume in the household, main source of drinking water, main source of lighting, access to latrine, type of latrine, waste water outlet, availability of bathing facility, availability of kitchen and LPG/PNG connection, main fuel used for cooking and availability of radio, transistor and television.

The citizens will also be asked about the predominant material of floor, wall and roof of the census house, condition of the census house, total number of persons normally residing in the household, whether the head of the household is a woman, whether the head of the household belongs to Scheduled Caste or Scheduled Tribe, number of dwelling rooms exclusively in possession of the household and the number of married couple or couples living in the household among others.