Cabinet clears digital Census, opens up N-sector to pvt firms

The Union Cabinet on Friday cleared a proposal to conduct the much-delayed Census at a cost of Rs 11,718 crore, Information and Broadcasting Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said.

The Cabinet also approved two significant Bills — one to establish a higher education regulator that will replace bodies such as the UGC and AICTE, and another to allow private companies to participate in the nuclear power generation.

Speaking at a briefing on Census, Vaishnaw said around 30 lakh enumerators would be involved in the entire exercise. The 16th edition of the Census since Independence would provide an option of self-enumeration to the citizens. The exercise which was scheduled to take place in 2021 got postponed due to the outbreak of the Covid pandemic across the country, he said.

The minister said the Census would be conducted in two phases — house-listing and housing census from April to September 2026; and population enumeration (PE) in February 2027.

For Ladakh and snow-bound non-synchronous areas of Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, the exercise would be conducted in September 2026, the minister said. Interestingly, on December 24, 2019, when the Cabinet approved Rs 8,754.23 crore for the 2021 Census, it also sanctioned Rs 3,941.35 crore for updating the National Population Register (NPR) across the country, except in Assam. This time, no such allocation for the NPR was announced.

The Census would also capture caste data electronically in the PE phase, an official statement said. The data would be collected using mobile applications that will be available for both Android and iOS versions. The use of a mobile app for data collection and the central portal for monitoring purposes would ensure better quality data, it said.

Around 30 lakh enumerators would visit each and every household and canvass a separate questionnaire for houselisting and housing census and population enumeration. It would generate 1.02 crore human days of employment.

The Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhikshan Bill is likely to be introduced in the Parliament session. The higher education regulator, which was proposed in the National Education Policy, looks to replace the University Grants Commission, the All India Council for Technical Education and the National Council for Teacher Education.

The commission is proposed to be set up as a single higher education regulator, but medical and law colleges will not be brought under its ambit.

The Atomic Energy Bill 2025, a reform that could open nuclear power generation to private companies for the first time, was also cleared by the Union Cabinet on Friday.