NEW DELHI: The Union Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has approved the proposal for conducting Census of India 2021 at a cost of Rs. 8,754.23 crore and updation of National Population Register (NPR) at a cost of Rs. 3,941.35 crore.
Census of India will cover the entire population in the country while NPR will also cover all the population except in the state of Assam. The Indian Census is largest administrative and statistical exercise in the world. The next decennial Census is due in 2021 and would be conducted in two phases:
- House listing and Housing Census - April to September, 2020 and
- Population Enumeration - 9th February to 28th February, 2021.
The National Population Register (NPR) will also be updated along with House listing and Housing Census except in Assam.
- 30 lakh field functionaries will complete this gigantic exercise of national importance, up from 28 lakh in 2011.
- Use of mobile app for data collection and the Central portal for monitoring purpose will ensure early release of Census data with improved quality.
- Data dissemination will be much better and in a user friendly way so that all the queries on required parameters for policy making will be made available on the click of a button.
- Census-as-a-service (CaaS) will deliver on-demand data to ministries in a clean, machine-readable and actionable format.
