NEW DELHI: India is going to count its citizens’ castes for the first time since 1931, as the Census 2027 begins with the first phase this year. It will fill a 96-year gap in the official caste data that has shaped policies on welfare, reservations, and political representation through guesswork and contested surveys so far.

The Union Cabinet approved caste enumeration as part of Census 2027 in 2025. The exercise will be India’s first fully digital census, using mobile applications, geo-referenced mapping, and self-enumeration portals. Data collectors will use apps instead of paper. A Census Management and Monitoring System will allow real-time tracking of progress across the country’s 784 districts.

The last full population census was conducted in 2011. It deployed 27 lakh enumerators with paper schedules. The 2021 census was postponed—first by the COVID-19 pandemic and then by administrative delays—making Census 2027 the 16th census in India’s history and the first after a 16-year gap.

The proposed cost for the 2027 edition reflects the scale of the delay. The government estimates Census 2027 to cost Rs 11,718 crore. The planned 2021 census carried an approved budget of Rs 8,754 crore. The Socio-Economic and Caste Census of 2011, conducted separately from the official census, cost Rs 4,893.6 crore. However, its caste data was never released.

Caste data, absent from official censuses since independence, returns now in a politically charged moment. Only Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes were enumerated in the census exercises conducted after 1947. Other Backward Classes, whose reservation claims have rested on the 1931 census and the Mandal Commission estimates, have no recent government-verified count.

The upcoming census process, according to the government communique, will proceed in two phases: house listing, which has started this year, and population enumeration will commence in the second phase in 2027. About 31 lakh enumerators and supervisors, overseen by one lakh census officials, will conduct the operation. Citizens can also self-report through an online portal.

The political implication of this massive exercise extends beyond the caste column. Census 2027 will generate the first updated population dataset since 2011 -- data that will feed into delimitation, the constitutionally mandated redrawing of parliamentary and assembly constituencies. Delimitation has been frozen since the 1970s to prevent southern states, which controlled population growth earlier, from losing seats to faster-growing northern states. The freeze formally lifts after 2026.

This story has been written by Vismay Basu.