Explained | Impact of delay in Census 2021

Apart from being used to demarcate constituencies, data is vital to administration

Census 2021 has been postponed indefinitely, the Ministry of Home Affairs told the Lok Sabha last week. The massive, decennial exercise came to a grinding halt . Apart from being used to demarcate constituencies, the Census data is also vital to the administration, and planning of key welfare schemes could be affected by the delay. The Centre’s intent to conduct Census 2021 was notified in the Gazette of India on March 28, 2019. The exercise was to have been conducted in two phases, with the housing Census from April to September 2020 and population enumeration from February 9, 2021, but did not take place due to the spread of COVID-19. In March 2021, the Home Ministry gave a Parliamentary panel a tentative alternative timeline. The fieldwork for the first phase, which would provide data on housing conditions, household amenities and assets possessed by households, is expected during 2021-22, while the fieldwork to count the population and provide data on demography, religion, Scheduled Castes and Tribes (SC/ST), language, literacy and education, economic activity, migration and fertility would be done in 2023-24, it said.