Census 2027 count moved up in UP, Punjab, Goa and parts of Uttarakhand

The Union government advanced the population count for Census 2027 in four states that go to the polls next spring. A gazette notification issued on 5 September by Registrar General and Census Commissioner Mrityunjay Kumar Narayan sets house-to-house enumeration in Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Goa and the non-snow-bound parts of Uttarakhand from 1 December 2026 to 4 January 2027. A revisional round will run from 5 to 9 January. The reference date for those areas is 00:00 hours on 5 January 2027.

Residents there can fill the form themselves online from 16 to 30 November 2026 before enumerators begin door-to-door work. The rest of the country keeps the earlier plan: a nationwide reference date of 1 March 2027, with the main count in February. Ladakh and the snow-bound belts of Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand already use 1 October 2026 as their reference date. Their fieldwork is due to finish by 30 September.

Manipur is the fifth state with an assembly term ending by May 2027. The government formally deferred the census there "till further declaration." Local demands to complete a National Register of Citizens exercise first had already delayed the first phase.

The reason given for the four-state advance is logistics. Elections and the census draw on the same pool of government staff, most of them teachers. Assembly terms end on 14 March 2027 in Goa, 16 March in Punjab, 28 March in Uttarakhand and 22 May in Uttar Pradesh. A February count in those states would have collided with nomination, polling and counting.

Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh called the change shoddy planning and said nefarious political calculations sat behind it. The dates of those elections have been known since the last assembly votes. The first Census 2027 notification, issued on 16 June 2025, had still put the main count in February 2027 except in the high snow belts.

This census is the first in independent India to record caste beyond Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. The second phase form has 40 questions, 13 of them new against the 2011 schedule. The new fields include spouse's name, nationality, father's and mother's particulars, digital literacy, permanent address, place of Covid-19 vaccination, number of bank accounts, passport number, and whether the person holds a driving licence, mobile, Aadhaar and voter ID. Respondents may decline to name a caste or say they belong to none.

India last completed a census in 2011. The 2021 round never happened. That 15-year gap is why the form is longer and why states about to vote care about the timing. A January reference date in Uttar Pradesh means the published tables for that state will describe a slightly earlier population than the March tables for Bihar or Maharashtra. Demographers will have to say so when they compare them.

The snow-bound exception inside Uttarakhand is easy to miss and easy to get wrong. Villages that are cut off in winter stay on the October 2026 clock. The rest of the state moves to January. District officers will have to keep two calendars.

What happens next is ordinary and heavy. Teachers will be trained. The self-enumeration portal will either work in November or it will not. Opposition parties in Lucknow, Chandigarh, Panaji and Dehradun will watch the caste column and the deletion lists with the same intensity they are watching the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls. The census and the rolls are different exercises. They will be read together anyway.