India begins counting more than a billion people in massive census

Billion-plus people, three million officials, 33 questions – India begins huge census

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Does your house have a concrete roof or a thatched one?

What is your main cereal? Do you have internet access – or just a basic mobile phone? And how many married couples live under your roof?

These are among the 33 questions that more than a billion Indians will be asked as the country launches the world’s largest census on Wednesday, marking the first population count in more than 15 years.

The two-phase exercise, billed as the world’s most ambitious of its kind, will see more than three million officials spend a year counting every person in India.

India’s 16th census – the eighth since independence in 1947 – will also include caste data and is seen as crucial for policy, welfare delivery and political representation in the world’s most populous country.

With more than 1.4 billion people, India overtook China in 2023, according to the United Nations Population Fund.

Yet, falling fertility and a median age of 28 mean it remains one of the world’s youngest countries, with nearly 70% of its population of working age.

The last census was held in 2011, with the 2021 round delayed by the pandemic and later pushed back further due to administrative and electoral scheduling – the first time the decennial exercise missed its schedule.

The exercise will span 36 states and federally-administered territories, more than 7,000 sub-districts, over 9,700 towns and nearly 640,000 villages, with fieldwork carried out by enumerators and supervisors – typically schoolteachers, government staff and local officials.

For the first time, the census will be conducted digitally, with enumerators using mobile apps to collect and upload data.

Authorities have introduced self-enumeration, letting residents submit details online via a 16-language portal that generates a unique ID for verification by census workers.

There will be two phases of ⁠physical door-to-door surveys.

The first phase, known as the House Listing and Housing Census, will gather information on housing conditions, amenities and household assets.

The second phase – population enumeration – is scheduled for February 2027 and will collect detailed data on demographics, education, migration and fertility.

It will also include caste enumeration, a politically sensitive issue that has long been debated.

The initial rollout will begin in selected regions, including Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Delhi, Goa, Karnataka, Mizoram and Odisha.

In these areas, self-enumeration will run from 1 to 15 April, followed by a house listing and housing survey between 16 April and 15 May.

From its origins as a rudimentary headcount under colonial rule, India’s census questionnaire has steadily expanded in scope, mirroring the state’s changing priorities.

The first attempt in 1872 contained 17 questions and was essentially a house register – recording who lived where, along with basic markers such as age, religion, caste and occupation.

By 1881, when the first synchronous nationwide census was conducted, the template had stabilised around identity (name, gender, marital status), social markers (caste, religion, language) and rudimentary education and disability categories.

Over the next decades, questions on language, literacy and occupation were refined, adding secondary work and dependency details.

English proficiency – a colonial preoccupation – was one of 16 questions in the 1901 census.

A shift began with the 1941 census, when its 22-question schedule moved from “who you are” to also “how you live”.

Fertility, employment status, economic dependency, migration and job search entered the frame, signalling a growing administrative focus on economic behaviour.

After independence, this widened further: the 1951 and 1961 rounds incorporated nationality, displacement (in the shadow of Partition), land ownership and more work categories.

From the 1970s onwards, the census took on a distinctly socio-economic lens.

Migration histories, duration of residence, fertility patterns and detailed employment classifications became standard.

In more recent decades, especially in 2001 and 2011, the census has tracked the modernising economy: commuting patterns, marginal versus main work, education attendance and increasingly detailed disability and fertility data.

That evolving lens is now extending to how households themselves are defined. In the latest census, a couple in a live-in relationship can be recorded as married if they consider their “relationship as a stable union” – signalling a quiet shift towards recognising changing social realities.

But as the scope of data collection has widened, so too have concerns around how such information might be used.

“Although the census has nothing to do with citizenship, this can create anxiety, prompting some families to over-report or list absent migrant members during the census to avoid any perceived exclusion,” says KS James, an Indian demographer at Princeton University.

Beyond these concerns, there is a more fundamental problem: India has been making policy without a recent population baseline.

In the absence of a fresh census, it has relied on sample surveys – from consumption expenditure to labour force data – with the statistics ministry working to keep them broadly representative.

For economists like Ashwini Deshpande of Ashoka University, the census is essential to update the basic map of India itself – what counts as rural, urban or increasingly peri-urban.

Much of that classification still rests on 2011 data, even though many areas have since transformed, blurring the lines that underpin policy.

“That has real consequences for India’s vast welfare and public spending system,” says Deshpande.

If eligibility for schemes is based on faulty or outdated data, the number of beneficiaries can be misjudged, distorting delivery. Programmes like the nationwide rural jobs guarantee, for instance, depend on an accurate sense of which areas are still “rural” – a category that may have shifted significantly over 15 years.

Without current data, millions of urban migrants – often in informal jobs and housing – remain poorly captured in policy design, a gap laid bare during the pandemic.

“This census is crucial – it is the definitive snapshot of India, capturing everything from caste and religion to jobs, education and amenities, and offering the most complete picture of how the population lives,” says Deshpande.