The census exercise, which was originally scheduled to take place in 2021, has been further pushed to 2023-24. In a letter sent to all states and Union Territories on Tuesday, the office of the Registrar General of India (RGI) has extended the deadline of freezing of administrative boundaries to December 31, 2022. Since the Census can only begin a few months after the administrative boundaries are frozen, the possibility of a Census in 2022 is ruled out. Also, the Census exercise will be preceded by house-listing. Earlier, the deadline for jurisdictional changes had been kept at June 30. In March this year, the government had notified certain amendments to Census rules to allow citizens to self-enumerate themselves in the Census and the National Population Register (NPR). The development had led to speculation that the house-listing phase of the Census may begin this year itself. In the letter sent to the states, the RGI has cited Covid-19 pandemic as the reason for extending the deadline. “Owing to the prevailing conditions due to the Covid-19 pandemic, danger of increased probability of its spread and the preoccupation/involvement of the states/UTs in speeding up the vaccination drive against Covid-19 in the country, it would not be possible to start the work of ensuing Census this year. Also, the time period for conducting the ensuing Census is not yet decided,” it said. As per rule 8(iv) of the Census Rules, 1990, the boundaries of administrative units shall be frozen from the date intimated by the Census Commissioner, which shall not be earlier than one year from the Census reference date. “As such, it has now been decided by the competent authority to further extend the date of freezing of boundaries up to 31st December, 2022,” the letter said. Before every Census, states are required to provide information on changes in the number of notified districts, villages, towns and other administrative units such as tehsils, talukas and police stations to the RGI. For the 2021 Census, the RGI had first issued a jurisdictional change updation notice on December 22, 2017. It had then asked the states to update the changes by January 31, 2020 with December 31, 2019 being fixed as the deadline for freezing of boundaries for the purpose of the Census. The house-listing phase of the Census had then been scheduled to be held from April 1, 2020 to September 30, 2020. It was during this period that RGI was also supposed to conduct the enumeration for the NPR, which is the precursor to the preparation of National Register of Citizens . While both NPR and NRC have created much controversy in the wake of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), with many states openly opposing them, the deadline for Census was indefinitely postponed in early 2020 due to the outbreak of Covid-19 in the country. The deadline was first extended till December 31, 2020, then to March 31, 2021, then to June 30, 2021, then to December 31, 2021 and later to June 30, 2022. According to provisional RGI data , the number of districts have gone up from 640 in 2011 to 736.
