Home Minister announces digital census in 2021, proposes multipurpose ID card

Moving from paper to digital format, Home Minister Amit Shah has announced that next census exercise will be completely digital one. It will be assisted by a mobile app, which will be used in the collection of data.

"A mobile app will be used in Census 2021. It will be a transformation from paper census to digital census," said Shah. Along with census exercise, the data for the National Population Register (NPR) will also be collected.

Further, he proposed a single multi-purpose card for the digital census.

Why is it so difficult to link and update birth and death registration with census data? Shah questioned adding possibilities for having just one card for
all utilities like Aadhaar, passport, bank account, driving licence, voter card.

He also pitched for a system that when a person dies, the information is updated in the population data automatically. Around Rs 12,000 crore is proposed to be spent on preparation of NPR and census.

A total of 33 lakh enumerators, the persons who conduct door-to-door counting, would be mobilised for data collection.

The government had announced that the next census will be conducted in two phases with March 1, 2021. A pre-test of Census 2021, which began on August 12, will go on till the end of this month.

The next Census will be the sixteenth census in the country. India, which is the second most populated country in the world, has about 17.5% of the world's population.