Census 2027 must fully record population of minority groups, say ex-bureaucrats

A group of 90 ex-bureaucrats on Monday urged the census commissioner to make sure that the upcoming Census in 2027 fully records the population of minority groups in the country.

The former civil servants, who are part of the Constitutional Conduct Group, said: “At a time when political leaders openly express their opposition to the inclusion of so-called ‘Bangladeshi Muslims’ in the electoral rolls, care must be taken to ensure that the Census fully records the population of various minority groups in the country, covering religion, caste and tribe.”

In a letter to Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India Mrityunjay Kumar Narayan, the former civil servants also questioned the “lack of transparency” about the reasons for the decennial Census being delayed by six years.

This lack of transparency, the ex-bureaucrats said, has led to “unnecessary apprehensions in the public mind” that the Census is being conducted now to enable the completion of the delimitation exercise in 2027-’28, in time for the 2029 Lok Sabha election.

“We would certainly hope that no such extraneous considerations have influenced the timing of the 2027 Census,” the letter read.

Delimitation is the process of redrawing the territorial boundaries of electoral constituencies. The Census 2027 will take place in two phases – house listing from April to September 2026, and population enumeration in February 2027.

The last decennial Census exercise was held in 2011. In 2020, India was set to begin the first phase of the exercise, but it had to be delayed as the coronavirus pandemic hit.

On Monday, the ex-bureaucrats said that while they could understand that the Census could not be completed in 2021 because of the Covid-19 pandemic, they failed to comprehend why the exercise could not be completed by 2023.

The signatories to the letter also noted that the Other Backward Classes had not been specifically classified in the Census. The ex-bureaucrats further added that the methodology for caste enumeration was yet to be announced.

In April 2025, the Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs had approved the enumeration of caste in the next census.

The Opposition had been demanding a nationwide caste census. The proponents of such an exercise argue that it will help identify the true population of the country’s Other Backward Classes and other castes, in turn paving the way for policies such as expanded quotas.

On the process for enumerating caste, the former civil servants said: “While one option could be to compile a list of castes for persons to select from… we feel the better option is to leave the field open in the Census form, as was done in the 2011 Socio Economic and Caste Census.”

The letter also said that the methodology for surveying and enumerating languages could be used for condensing the Census data. However, this would require the government to keep the data open for scrutiny by scholars and involve institutions like the Anthropological Survey of India, it added.

The ex-bureaucrats added that data on tribes had been collected in past Censuses only from the Scheduled Tribe population.

“If all tribes, other than those in the ST list, are classified and recorded, a long existing injustice to the Denotified Tribe communities, which account for more than 100 million people, would be rectified,” it added.

‘Census should be unexceptionable’: Ex-bureaucrats

The signatories to the letter further said they hoped that the Census exercise will be “unexceptionable and in conformity with the United Nations guidelines laid down in the Principles and Recommendations for Population and Housing Censuses (Revision 4 March 2025), to which India is a signatory”.

Past experiences, especially those from the 2001 and 2011 Censuses, show that mere technological advances in computing facilities do not necessarily speed up the release of data, the former bureaucrats said. They stressed the need to “be open to the possibilities of errors” and to put in place effective measures to ensure data quality.

“Providing mobile phones to code everything at field level, where the enumerator is required to select the correct option from a dropdown menu, does not allow for correction of errors in the recorded code,” they noted.