Census 2027 to be a fully digital enterprise

NEW DELHI: (Feb 26) The Census 2027, which will recast the decennial headcount as a fully digital enterprise, will have at its heart the Census Management and Monitoring System, or CMMS -- a dedicated digital portal engineered to orchestrate one of the largest administrative exercises in the world.

Marking a decisive break from the paper-bound enumeration, the portal will replace clipboards and carbon copies with handheld devices, geotagged mapping tools and a centralised web-based command platform in what will be India's first fully digital Census.

The bespoke software backbone, designed to monitor the exercise in near real time, will allow 3.2 million field functionaries -- enumerators and supervisors -- to capture a granular demographic, social and economic data from hundreds of millions of households using handheld devices.