From the 1970s onwards, the census took on a distinctly socio-economic lens.
Migration histories, duration of residence, fertility patterns and detailed employment classifications became standard.
In more recent decades, especially in 2001 and 2011, the census has tracked the modernising economy: commuting patterns, marginal versus main work, education attendance and increasingly detailed disability and fertility data.
That evolving lens is now extending to how households themselves are defined. In the latest census, a couple in a live-in relationship can be recorded as married if they consider their “relationship as a stable union” – signalling a quiet shift towards recognising changing social realities.
But as the scope of data collection has widened, so too have concerns around how such information might be used.
Some analysts say recent efforts to build databases – including the National Population Register (NPR) – and intensive revisions of electoral rolls have sharpened public anxieties around official counting, often linking it to questions of citizenship and inclusion.
“Although the census has nothing to do with citizenship, this can create anxiety, prompting some families to over-report or list absent migrant members during the census to avoid any perceived exclusion,” says KS James, an Indian demographer at Princeton University.
Beyond these concerns, there is a more fundamental problem: India has been making policy without a recent population baseline.
In the absence of a fresh census, it has relied on sample surveys – from consumption expenditure to labour force data – with the statistics ministry working to keep them broadly representative.
For economists like Ashwini Deshpande of Ashoka University, the census is essential to update the basic map of India itself – what counts as rural, urban or increasingly peri-urban.
Much of that classification still rests on 2011 data, even though many areas have since transformed, blurring the lines that underpin policy.
“That has real consequences for India’s vast welfare and public spending system,” says Deshpande.
If eligibility for schemes is based on faulty or outdated data, the number of beneficiaries can be misjudged, distorting delivery. Programmes like the nationwide rural jobs guarantee, for instance, depend on an accurate sense of which areas are still “rural” – a category that may have shifted significantly over 15 years.
Without current data, millions of urban migrants – often in informal jobs and housing – remain poorly captured in policy design, a gap laid bare during the pandemic.
“This census is crucial – it is the definitive snapshot of India, capturing everything from caste and religion to jobs, education and amenities, and offering the most complete picture of how the population lives,” says Deshpande.
