The Union government has amended the Census Rules framed in 1990 to allow the details to be captured and stored in an electronic format and also to enable self-enumeration by respondents.
The decennial Census exercise, which was indefinitely postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, will be held for the first time both in the digital mode and through paper schedules (questionnaire/forms).
The first phase of Census 2021 — Houselisting and Housing Census along with updating the National Population Register (NPR) — was scheduled to be held from April-September 2020 but was postponed indefinitely. The second and main phase — Population Enumeration — was to be concluded by March 5, 2021.
