Overview
- The Registrar General of India announced Saturday that self-enumeration will run from November 16 to 30, 2026, door‑to‑door population counting will take place from December 1, 2026, to January 4, 2027, and a revisional round will follow from January 5 to 9, 2027.
- For the areas covered by the December–January exercise the official reference date for recording population details is fixed at 00:00 hours on January 5, 2027.
- The gazette notification keeps an earlier reference date of 00:00 hours on October 1, 2026 for Ladakh and snow‑bound non‑synchronous areas of Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand and preserves separately timed operations for those regions.
- The government has deferred house‑listing operations in Manipur and is staging the census in two formal phases with a digital self‑enumeration option to reduce door‑to‑door pressure on field staff.
- The Census was postponed from 2021, the Union Cabinet has approved Rs 11,718 crore for the exercise, and advancing schedules aims to avoid tying up teachers and other public servants needed for both counting and likely early‑2027 elections.