Census 2027: Amit Shah launches mascots ‘Pragati’ and ‘Vikas’; what’s new this time

New Delhi: Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Thursday soft-launched four digital tools and unveiled the mascots of Census 2027, ‘Pragati’ (female) and ‘Vikas’ (male).These mascots symbolize the equal participation of men and women in India’s journey to become a developed nation by 2047.The new digital platform, developed by the Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), is designed to support the enumeration process of the world’s largest census exercise.The 2027 Census is scheduled to begin on April 1, 2026, and will be conducted in two phases. The first phase, a home listing and housing census, will take place from April to September 2026, followed by the census phase in February 2027.The national headcount will be conducted entirely digitally for the first time. Before enumerators begin going door-to-door, citizens can also conduct a self-census online in 16 languages.At the heart of the event will be the Census Management and Monitoring System (CMMS), a dedicated digital portal designed to coordinate one of the largest administrative operations in the world.The system will mark a major shift from traditional paper-based enumerations. Instead of clipboards and paper forms, field staff will use handheld devices, geotagged mapping tools and a centralized web-based monitoring platform.More than 3.2 million enumerators, supervisors and other field officers across the country will participate in the exercise. They will use handheld devices to collect detailed demographic, social and economic data from hundreds of millions of households.The collected data will be transmitted and processed through the CMMS platform, allowing it to be aggregated, verified and monitored in near real-time, significantly reducing the time required for compilation and error correction.The 2027 Census will be the 16th national census since independence and the first to be conducted fully digitally, with a self-enumeration option for citizens.The decennial census was originally scheduled for 2021 but was postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic.According to the Registrar General of India (RGI), in the first phase of the exercise, citizens will be asked 33 questions focusing on house listings and housing details.