The Union government has changed the 1990 Census Rules to allow for the gathering and storage of data in an electronic format, as well as self-enumeration by respondents. The decennial enumeration of population, which was postponed indefinitely owing to the COVID-19 epidemic, will be conducted for the first time in both digital and paper formats (questionnaires/forms).
The first part of Census 2021, which included house listing and housing censuses as well as updating the National Population Register (NPR), was supposed to take place between April and September 2020, but it was postponed indefinitely. The second and most important phase, Population Enumeration, was set to end on March 5, 2021.
Around 30 lakh enumerators, largely government personnel and government school instructors, would be tasked with gathering information on 650-800 persons using both online and offline methods.
People can fill in their details in Census
The updated Census guidelines were published in the Gazette on March 11 by the Registrar-General of India, who stated that “a person may fill-up, complete, and submit the census schedule through self-enumeration.” Self-enumeration, it continued, “means respondents filling out, completing, and submitting census schedules by themselves.”
Though the government had previously said that the enumeration would be conducted in an electronic format with self-enumeration permitted, the rules were revised and notified to make the statement official.
According to the Union Home Minister’s annual report for 2019-20, there will be a three-pronged approach to updating the NPR database: self-updating, where residents will be able to update their own data fields on a web portal after following some authentication protocols; updating NPR data in paper format, and on mobile mode.
The respondent’s information will be shown on an in-house built mobile application for performing the enumeration, but no “biometrics or papers” will be collected. This information will be saved in the system for future use. The NPR maintains an electronic database of moreover 119 crore residents, which was previously compiled in 2010 and 2015.