Amit Shah self-enumerates for Census 2027, urges people to cooperate in ‘national duty’
Union Home Minister Amit Shah completed the self-enumeration exercise for Census 2027 on April 1, 2026, becoming among the first senior government functionaries to participate in India's first-ever digital self-enumeration process.
Shah used the online portal to submit his household's demographic data and urged all citizens to treat the self-enumeration as a "national duty" and cooperate with the census exercise.
The Home Ministry, under whose jurisdiction the Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India (ORGI) falls, oversees the entire Census 2027 exercise.
The self-enumeration phase runs from April 1–15, 2026, providing a 15-day window for citizens to voluntarily submit data online before enumerators conduct door-to-door surveys.
The minister highlighted that this census — India's first fully digital census — will also capture caste data (including OBC) for the first time since Independence, marking a significant policy shift.
The self-enumeration portal is available in 16 languages, and households receive a unique Self-Enumeration ID upon completion, which is verified during the subsequent enumerator visit.
Registrar General and Census Commissioner: Role and Mandate
The Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India (ORGI) is a statutory body under the Ministry of Home Affairs, responsible for conducting the decennial census and maintaining the Civil Registration System (CRS) — the system for registering births and deaths. The Registrar General also maintains the National Population Register (NPR).
Key Details
- ORGI operates under the Census Act, 1948, which gives it authority to collect data on population, housing, and related socio-economic variables.
- The Census Commissioner is a senior IAS officer; the current role involves coordinating approximately 32 lakh field workers across India.
- The National Population Register (NPR) is a database of "usual residents" of India — distinct from the census but often conducted simultaneously during the house-listing phase.
- The NPR update was deferred alongside Census 2021; it is now expected to be updated during the Census 2027 house-listing phase (April–May 2026).
- ORGI also releases the Annual Health Survey, Sample Registration System (SRS), and linguistic data from census exercises.
Amit Shah's public participation as Home Minister — the ministry that oversees ORGI — serves as both a political endorsement and a call-to-action for citizens to engage with the self-enumeration portal, critical for achieving high voluntary response rates in Phase I.
Digital Census: Technology and Data Governance
Census 2027 marks the transition from a paper-based to a fully mobile/digital data collection system. Enumerators will use dedicated Census Mobile Monitoring System (CMMS) app-enabled smartphones to collect data; citizens can pre-fill their data via the self-enumeration portal. This shift raises important data privacy and security questions — India now has the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, which governs how personal data may be collected and processed by the government.
Key Details
- The Census Mobile Monitoring System (CMMS) enables real-time supervision of enumerator progress.
- The self-enumeration portal (available in 16 languages) is hosted on government servers; data submitted is encrypted and linked to the household's geo-coordinates.
- The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (DPDPA) provides for certain exemptions for government processing of personal data for state functions — census data collection falls under this exemption framework.
- Census data is treated as confidential under Section 15 of the Census Act, 1948 — individual-level data cannot be disclosed for 15 years and is not shared with any government department for administrative use.
The self-enumeration exercise is the public-facing entry point of India's first digital census — the minister's participation highlights the government's push to maximise digital engagement and achieve better data quality than the traditional door-to-door-only approach.
Caste Data and the OBC Question
The decision to enumerate caste in Census 2027 — specifically OBC data, which has never been counted in a decennial census — is politically transformative. The last caste-based census in India was conducted in 1931 by British India. The Socio-Economic Caste Census (SECC) of 2011 collected caste data but was never officially published in usable form due to data quality issues and political sensitivities.
Key Details
- The Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs (CCPA) approved inclusion of caste enumeration in the Population Enumeration (PE) phase of Census 2027 in April 2025.
- The Mandal Commission (1980) estimated OBCs at 52% of India's population — but this figure has never been updated through an official census.
- The Supreme Court (in Pankaj Kumar Thakur v. State of Punjab, 2024) upheld sub-classification within SC reservations and suggested empirical data was necessary for equitable sub-classification — making census caste data legally significant.
- Six states (Bihar, Karnataka, Telangana, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra) have conducted their own OBC surveys, providing a partial data picture ahead of Census 2027.
Shah's emphasis on caste enumeration as part of the Census 2027 launch connects the administrative exercise to the BJP government's political commitment to OBC welfare and the broader demand for data-backed reservations policy.
- Self-enumeration period: April 1–15, 2026
- Portal languages: 16
- Supervising ministry: Ministry of Home Affairs
- Nodal body: Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India (ORGI)
- Legal basis: Census Act, 1948
- Data confidentiality: 15-year restriction under Section 15 of the Census Act
- Field force: approximately 32 lakh (enumerators + supervisors)
- Caste data collection: Population Enumeration phase (2027), first since 1931
- OBC population estimate (Mandal Commission, 1980): ~52% of India's population
- Digital framework: Census Mobile Monitoring System (CMMS) for enumerators; self-enumeration portal for citizens
- Related legislation: Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (governs data processing)
- NPR update: Expected during house-listing phase (April–May 2026)
- Cabinet approval for census scheme: Cost of ₹11,718.24 crore