Union home minister Amit Shah on Monday said: “The new census will become the basis for developing the country in an inclusive manner. Earlier, it was not accurate and there was no link between the census and the people making development plans.” The last Census was conducted in 2011 and has been indefinitely delayed due to Covid-19. The decadal exercise started in 2019 with houselisting but had to be postponed in 2020 due to the pandemic.

Shah inaugurated Janganana Bhavan and noted that the Census data is helpful in making the basic plan of development and providing basic amenities to the underprivileged and exploited. “All-round and all-inclusive development of the country can be done only through data-based planning and for such data we have no other means except census,” Shah stated.

The home minister added that Modi government will now conduct the census electronically, in which every person will have the right to fill the data, it will be verified and audited and it will include more than 35 parameters of socio-economic status.

Shah observed that government is bringing provision that “as soon as a person turns 18, the Election Commission will take information from him and make his voter card, in case of death of someone, the census registrar will send the information to the Election Commission and his name will be removed from the voters’ list.”

“Census is the process of charting the course of development of the country, for this it is necessary that the SRS upgraded mobile application along with geofencing should create an alert system so that the officials doing the census will not go out of the allotted area,” he added.

The home minister said that registration of birth and death will be made online and a Bill on it will be introduced in the upcoming session of Parliament. “From today, online sale of all census publications has started, this will benefit planners and researchers,” Shah added.

Shah also inaugurated a web portal for upgraded SRS mobile application with geofencing and web portal for online sale of census publications and released a census compendium.