Among new Census questions: Do you use bottled water, how many smartphones?

On Monday, the Census office, which is commemorating 150 years of its existence, finally got its own new building — Janganana Bhawan. The new office space was inaugurated by Home Minister Amit Shah. To mark its 150th anniversary, the Census office has also come out with a new publication — A Treatise on Indian Censuses since 1981 — that was released earlier this week.

The publication contains detailed information about the last four Census operations. It also has a chapter on preparations that were being made for the 2021 Census, including information that was to be collected for the first time. Among the other fresh introductions is whether “natural calamities” is a reason for migration in the family.

On religion, the publication says, the question has six options – Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Buddhist and Jain. “For other religions, write the name of the religion in full, but do not give any code number,” it says. There have been demands from the tribal community to list Sarna as a separate religion.

The house-listing exercise, which forms the first part of the Census and is carried out in the year prior to the Census year, was just about to begin, on April 1, 2020, when Covid intervened.

Coronavirus cases began emerging in India in March 2020, and a full lockdown was imposed on March 24 that year, forcing the Census to be put on hold. The house-listing exercise is followed by the actual population enumeration that happens in February of the Census year.

The 2021 Census was also supposed to be a digital exercise, though later it was decided to use electronic means as well as traditional paper forms to collect data.

In the publication, Mritunjay Kumar Narayan, Registrar General of India & Census Commissioner, said, “It was felt that on the eve of completion of conducting 150 years of Censuses in India and in the 75th year of Independence…, it would be an appropriate time to publish a similar compendium on the Censuses conducted over the last fifty years since the monographs had been published.”