India launched its first census since 2011 on April 1, 2026 — a 16-year gap during which the country added roughly 200 million people it technically had no official count of. The government is calling it "historic" and "fully digital," which is one way to describe doing the bare minimum with a smartphone app.
On April 1, 2026, India finally launched the first phase of Census 2027 — the Houselisting and Housing Census — after a 16-year gap since the last headcount in 2011. The 2021 census was delayed due to COVID, then delayed again because reasons, then delayed some more, making this the longest gap between censuses in independent India. During this interregnum, the government continued making policy decisions based on 2011 data — allocating resources, drawing constituencies, and distributing welfare for a population snapshot that predated smartphones becoming ubiquitous in India. The exercise will cost $1.24 billion, deploy 3 million officials armed with a mobile app, and survey 1.4 billion people over an entire year. It is also, for the first time since 1931, enumerating caste — a decision so politically charged that governments have been avoiding it for 95 years. Southern states are particularly anxious because a subsequent delimitation exercise could redistribute parliamentary seats toward northern states that grew their populations faster, effectively penalizing states for succeeding at family planning.