India prepares the world's largest census: 1.4 billion citizens will be registered

New Delhi.- India will mobilize more than three million civil servants starting tomorrow, Wednesday, to begin the first digital census in its history, an unprecedented logistical operation that seeks to register 1.4 billion people after fifteen years without updating its official statistics.

The process will begin with the opening of the "self-enumeration" portal, a platform in 16 languages that will allow citizens of territories such as Delhi, Goa or Karnataka to complete their data autonomously before the in-person visit of the surveyors, replacing the old paper forms with a centralized real-time system. This exercise, which has a budget of about $1.4 billion, comes after a five-year delay stemming from the pandemic and administrative adjustments. The Registrar General, Mritunjay Kumar Narayan, highlighted this week in New Delhi that technological deployment is fundamental to streamline a count that was historically done manually, which made it difficult to consolidate data in a country of rapid urbanization, internal migration, and millions of informal settlements that lack prior registration.

Towards a "caste register" in 2027

The first phase of this census, called housing listing and infrastructure inventory, will be rolled out gradually across the entire territory until next September. During these months, the enumerators will collect detailed information about the conditions of the households, including access to basic services such as potable water, electricity, and sanitation.

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This diagnosis is fundamental for the design of public policies and the allocation of state resources, since the last official count dates back to 2011, when the population was 1.210 million.

To ensure the accuracy of the count, the Government has executed a massive training plan for 3.1 million civil servants, supervised by a network of 45,000 field instructors.

The process will culminate in February 2027 with the enumeration of the population, the central axis of which will be the expected caste register, a sensitive piece of data that has not been collected exhaustively since India's independence in 1947. This information is crucial for updating public employment quotas and social assistance aimed at historically disadvantaged groups. Until the count is finished, the Government has prohibited any changes to district boundaries or city names to avoid distortions in data collection. These data will confirm the mathematical projections indicating that India is the most populous country in the world.