India's Census 2027 gazette makes caste item 10 of 40, and is silent on how the answer is recorded

The notification that settles what India will ask its population in 2027 runs to 40 items, and caste is item 10. It was published in the Gazette of India Extraordinary, Part II, Section 3, Sub-section (ii), issue number 4325, dated Friday 14 August 2026, as S.O. 4505(E). It comes from the Ministry of Home Affairs, Office of the Registrar General, India, is issued under sub-section (1) of section 8 of the Census Act, 1948, and is signed by Mritunjay Kumar Narayan, Registrar General of India and Census Commissioner, under file number 9/8/2025-CD (Cen).

The wording of item 10 is short: "Scheduled Caste (SC)/ Scheduled Tribe (ST)/Caste". It sits between item 9, religion, and item 11, father's particulars. Item 8, immediately before religion, is "Nationality as declared". That single line is the whole of the caste provision in the gazette.

What the notification does is instruct census officers to ask persons within their allotted local area "all such questions" pertaining to the items listed, for collecting information through the Household Schedule. What it does not do is prescribe how an answer is to be captured. There are no response categories in the gazette, no code lists, no tick boxes and no drop down menus, because a section 8 notification is a list of subject items rather than a form. A reader of the notification alone cannot tell whether the enumerator's mobile application will present a coded list of caste names, an open text field, or some combination of the two. That decision sits in the enumeration instructions and in the design of the app, and neither has been published in this notification.

This matters more than it might appear. The last time an Indian census counted caste in full was 1931. Every census since independence has recorded only Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe status, leaving other caste categories uncounted. Whether the 2027 return produces usable data depends heavily on capture design. An open field records what a respondent says and leaves the sorting until later, at the cost of spelling variants, synonyms and regional names multiplying into a very long tail. A pre-coded list produces tidier data but forces the classification decisions up front, and those decisions are politically contested. The gazette resolves none of this.

The other 39 items are wide ranging. Alongside the expected material on age, marital status, literacy, occupation, migration and fertility, the schedule asks for the total number of bank accounts, place of Covid-19 vaccination, mobile number if available, Aadhaar number if available, voter ID number if available, passport number if the person holds an Indian passport, and availability of a driving licence. Item 15 covers literacy and digital literacy status. Item 6 asks age at marriage in completed years.

The timetable is set by a series of earlier notifications from the same office. The first phase, houselisting operations, was fixed for 1 April 2026 to 30 September 2026 by a notification catalogued on 8 January 2026. The questionnaire for that first phase was notified separately, catalogued on 22 January 2026. A further notification, catalogued on 3 August 2026, sets separate population enumeration dates for the Union Territory of Ladakh, snow-bound areas of the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir, and snow-bound areas of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand. Reporting by Akashvani News, the government broadcaster, and by The News Mill puts those snow-bound areas in September 2026 and the main population enumeration in February 2027.

Akashvani News reported on 8 January 2026 that the Union Cabinet approved the census scheme at a cost of 11,718.24 crore rupees, that roughly 30 lakh field functionaries will be deployed as enumerators, supervisors, master trainers, charge officers and census officers, and that this is the first census in India conducted by digital means, using mobile applications on Android and iOS. It also reported a self-enumeration window of 15 days ahead of house to house listing, with timing set by each state and union territory. The decision to include caste enumeration was taken by the Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs in April 2025, according to the same broadcaster; The News Mill dates that decision to 30 April 2025.

Several things remain unknown. The gazette does not say whether item 10 will be recorded against a list or as free text, and no enumeration instruction manual for the second phase has been published alongside it. It is not known how many distinct caste names the office expects to receive, what classification will be applied to them afterwards, or whether results will be released at caste level, at a grouped level, or at all beyond the existing Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe totals. The notification fixes the question. It leaves open the answer.