Caste count returns to Census after 1931 as Centre notifies 40 questions

Census 2027 will seek caste details across all groups for the first time since 1931, alongside information on Aadhaar, voter ID, bank accounts and digital literacy

The Union Home Ministry on Friday notified the 40 questions that enumerators will ask during the population enumeration phase of Census 2027 — a list that brings comprehensive caste enumeration back to the Census for the first time since 1931 and seeks information on citizens' digital and documentary footprints in the national headcount.

 

Issued under the Census Act, 1948, and signed by Registrar General Mritunjay Kumar Narayan, the gazette notification triggers the second phase of the country's 16th Census, the first since 2011 and the first to be conducted digitally with an option to self-enumerate.

 

The headline change is question number 10. Where the 2011 form asked only whether a person was Scheduled Caste (SC) or Scheduled Tribe (ST), the 2027 version reads "SC/ST/Caste." India last recorded caste across all groups in 1931, and every post-Independence Census narrowed it to SC and ST status alone.

 

 

The new questions capture a respondent's Aadhaar number, voter ID, passport, driving licence, mobile number, permanent address and total number of bank accounts.

 

It further adds the place of Covid-19 vaccination, separate particulars for both parents and the spouse, digital literacy, and the discipline of study. The demographic core — age, religion, mother tongue, migration, work and fertility — largely carries over.

 

The Opposition questioned how caste will be recorded in the Census. Jairam Ramesh, the Congress general secretary in charge of communications, said it had been widely expected that caste would be captured through a pre-prepared, state-wise list — as in the Bihar and Telangana surveys — with respondents simply ticking the appropriate entry.

 

"This has, unfortunately, not happened, raising serious doubts on intent," he posted on X. Ramesh also pointed to a May 2025 letter from Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, arguing that its first and fundamental suggestion — to model the questionnaire on Telangana's survey and conceal nothing — had been ignored, with no dialogue held with political parties.

 

Census 2027 runs in two phases. The reference date is 00:00 hours on March 1, 2027, for most of the country, and October 1, 2026, for Ladakh and the snow-bound, non-synchronous areas of Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, where population enumeration takes place from September 1 to 30, 2026. Elsewhere, enumeration is scheduled for February 2027.

 

“In exercise of the powers conferred by sub-section (1) of section 8 of the Census Act, 1948 (37 of 1948), the Central Government hereby instructs and directs that the census officers may, within the limits of the local area for which they have been respectively appointed, ask all such questions of all persons residing within such limits, pertaining to the items enumerated below, for collecting information through the Household Schedule in connection with the Census of India 2027,” the notification directed as it released the 40 questions.