Rs 574 Crore: Census 2021 uncertainty grows as Budget allocation slashed to Rs 574 Crore | India News

NEW DELHI: The prospects for resumption of Census 2021 exercise, suspended since the outbreak of Covid pandemic in 2020, appear bleak in the coming year, going by the meagre Rs 574 crore allocation towards this head in 2025-26 budget.
The outlay for “Census Survey and Statistics/Registration General of India’ this year is only half of the Rs 1,309.5 crore allocation made in the last budget, and is almost at the same level as the revised estimate for 2024-25.
A meeting of the Union Cabinet on December 24, 2019 had approved the proposal for conducting Census 2021 at a cost of Rs 8,754.23 crore and updating the National Population Register (NPR) at Rs 3,941.35 crore.
Though Census 2021, due to start in April 2020, was postponed on account of Covid outbreak, there is still no definite word from the government still on when the decennial exercise will be taken up. Holding Census is crucial to the next delimitation exercise and implementation of the one-third quota for women across the country’s legislatures.
Sources indicate that the demand from several quarters for a caste census — possibly by including caste as one of the fields in the census questionnaire — may be holding back the decennial Census exercise. A call may need to be taken on whether caste should be recorded in the next census and the methodology to be adopted to do this accurately. The methodology may require some discussions with the parties demanding caste census, as the government by itself is yet to zero in on a foolproof method to capture ‘caste’ correctly.
Overall, the budget of the ministry of home affairs, at Rs 2.33 lakh crore, saw a 6.2% rise over that announced on February 1, 2024 and 8.7% more that the revised estimate for 2024-25. Policing got the lion’s share at Rs 1.6 lakh crore, up from a little under Rs 1.5 lakh crore in 2024-25. The focus of MHA‘s 2025-26 budget is also on creating the additional infrastructure for 100% rollout of the new criminal laws. Hence the outlay for modernisation of the police forces, including the crime and criminal network and systems (CCTNS), has gone up to Rs 4,069 crore from Rs 2623 crore, while the upgrade of Inter-Operable Criminal Justice System (ICJS) will now get Rs 300.2 crore as compared to Rs 123.1 allocated in 2024-25.