Census 2027 will ask 40 questions, and former officials want the extra fields explained

The Registrar General notified 40 questions for the Population Enumeration phase of Census 2027. Thirteen of those fields did not exist in 2011. They include parents' names, spouses' names, permanent addresses, nationality, the place of a Covid-19 vaccine, the number of bank accounts, and details of Aadhaar, voter ID, passport and driving licence.

Former census officials and a group of retired civil servants say two problems sit on top of each other. The new fields look to them like material for a National Population Register, and the calendar for four poll-bound states has been pulled forward into the winter migration season.

On 5 September the Registrar General advanced enumeration in Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Goa and the non-snowbound parts of Uttarakhand to 1 December 2026 through 4 January 2027, with a reference moment of midnight on 5 January. Self-enumeration opens online from 16 to 30 November. A revisional round runs 5 to 9 January. The rest of India, except snowbound belts already being counted against an 1 October reference date, will still be enumerated in February 2027 against 1 March.

Why the four-state shift is not only logistics

The official reason is staff. Teachers and other local officials cannot run an assembly election and a census in the same weeks. Goa's term ends 14 March 2027, Punjab's on 16 March, Uttarakhand's on 28 March and Uttar Pradesh's on 22 May. Manipur, also due in early 2027, has been deferred after local demands that an NRC precede the count.

P. Unni, a former census official quoted in The Hindu, said the winter window will miss migrant workers, especially from Uttar Pradesh, who are away from home in December. The traditional March reference date was chosen partly because that movement is lower. Congress communications chief Jairam Ramesh called the change shoddy planning and said the election dates were known when the original census schedule was set.

The exercise is India's first digital census and its first full caste count since 1931, aside from SC and ST tallies. The caste field is open-ended. Respondents may also refuse to name a caste or say they belong to none. The budget is Rs 11,718.24 crore. The count itself is 16 years late, after the 2021 round was shelved in the pandemic.

The NPR argument

Census returns are confidential under the Census Act, 1948. That confidentiality did not stop the 1951 records being used to build an early National Register of Citizens. Former officials say some of the new questions, especially parents' religion and place of birth, have little statistical use and a clear administrative one if they are later copied into an NPR file.

The Constitutional Conduct Group, in an open letter signed by 108 people including Julio Ribeiro, Najeeb Jung, Ashok Lavasa, Shivshankar Menon and Harsh Mander, asked the Centre to justify collecting personal data merely because it can. They argued that bank-account counts and ID numbers do not belong in a population census if the aim is household statistics and public policy.

The government has not published a field-by-field defence of the 13 additions. It has said the census remains a statistical exercise. That sentence will be tested when the software that stores the extra fields is described, and when it is clear whether those fields can be queried by any agency other than the Registrar General.

Three clocks, one form

India is now running three census clocks: snowbound areas against 1 October 2026, four election states against 5 January 2027, and the rest of the country against 1 March 2027. Comparability across those dates is a technical problem. Trust is the political one. If the extra questions stay unexplained, every household visit in December will carry an argument that the form is doing two jobs. If the Registrar General publishes a tight account of why each new field exists and who can see it, that argument loses its easiest line.

The house-listing phase is due to finish on 30 September. Population enumeration is the second and heavier lift. The next public document that matters is not a speech. It is the instruction manual that tells an enumerator what to do when a migrant is absent and whether a bank-account number is optional.