India has notified 40 census questions including caste, the first such count since 1931

The Office of the Registrar General has notified the questions to be put to every household in India's next census, and the schedule carries a caste column that covers all communities rather than only Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. Republic World reported on 14 August 2026 that 40 questions had been notified under powers conferred by the Census Act, 1948, and described the last comprehensive enumeration of all castes in an Indian population census as having taken place in 1931.

The reported schedule is unusually wide. Beyond name, relationship to the head of household, sex, date of birth, age, marital status, age at marriage and nationality, it takes religion, Scheduled Caste or Scheduled Tribe or caste status, disability, mother tongue and other languages known, literacy and digital literacy, school attendance, highest qualification and field of study. It takes work status, category of economic activity, occupation, industry, class of worker and details of the journey to work. It takes birthplace, last residence, reason for migration and duration in the current location. From eligible women it takes children ever born, children surviving and children born in the last year. It also asks for a mobile number, Aadhaar number, voter identity card, passport number, bank accounts, driving licence and the place of COVID-19 vaccination.

The mechanics were fixed earlier. News on AIR, the Prasar Bharati service, reported on 8 January 2026 that the first phase notification had issued. The Houselisting and Housing Census runs between April and September 2026, with each state and union territory completing its work inside a 30 day window. Population enumeration follows in February 2027, except in the union territory of Ladakh and the snow bound non synchronous areas of Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, where it is brought forward to September 2026. About 30 lakh field functionaries, including enumerators, supervisors, master trainers and charge officers, will be deployed. Collection is by mobile application, in Android and iOS versions, and households may self enumerate in a window opening 15 days before house to house listing begins. The cabinet approved an outlay of Rs 11,718.24 crore on 12 December 2025, and caste enumeration was approved on 30 April 2025.

The Registrar General's own Census Division pages state that the census operates under the Census Act, 1948 and the Census Rules, 1990, and that for the first time in Indian census history data will be collected digitally through a mobile application rather than on paper, with a separate code directory supplied for non numerical responses. There is a precedent for how the questions are fixed: the office's digital library holds a gazette notification dated 9 January 2020 which set the period of houselisting operations and the questions for the 2021 census, an exercise that was then overtaken by the pandemic and never carried out.

The two published counts of questions do not match, and the difference is instructive rather than contradictory. Al Jazeera, reporting on 1 April 2026, put the first phase at 33 questions, which is the houselisting schedule; the 40 questions notified in August belong to the population schedule taken in the second phase. Al Jazeera also described 1951 as the point at which routine caste enumeration was discontinued, which does not sit neatly beside the 1931 date used elsewhere, and the two accounts are not reconciled by any document opened for this article.

On what the data will settle, the academics quoted publicly are cautious. Ashwini Deshpande of Ashoka University told Al Jazeera that this would be the first systematic, population wide count of jati since 1931, which makes it a genuinely historic and deeply contested exercise. Sukhadeo Thorat of Jawaharlal Nehru University said that to address the problems of specific disadvantaged groups, you need data, obtainable only through caste enumeration. The development economist Dipa Sinha said the information could become highly politically relevant given differential population growth across regions. Al Jazeera also recorded concerns about the transparency of methodology and about the census being linked to the National Register of Citizens and the Citizenship Amendment Act.

What is not yet known matters as much as what is. The gazette notification itself could not be opened for this article, so the text of the 40 questions rests on a single published report rather than on the instrument. None of the documents opened stated a reference date for population enumeration, only the month. And a digital schedule that records caste alongside Aadhaar, voter identity and passport numbers raises a question no notification answers: what the linkage rules are, and who may see the joined record.