Face of Nation : A mobile app will be used in the next census of India which will be carried out in 2021, Union Home Minister Amit Shah said today. “A mobile app will be used in Census 2021. It will be a transformation from paper census to digital census,” Mr Shah said at event in Delhi.
Home Minister also proposed the idea of a multipurpose ID card for every citizen which includes passport, Aaadhar and the voter card. Mr Shah said that the National Population Register is being prepared for the first time in the 2021 census.
“We can have just one card for all utilities like Aadhaar, passport, bank account, driving licence, voter card. This is a potential,” he said
For the first time in the 140-year history of the census in India, data is proposed to be collected through an app and people who conduct door-to-door counting would be encouraged to use their own phone. India’s last census was carried out in 2011 when the country’s population stood at 121 crore.
In March this year, the government had announced that the next census will be conducted in two phases with March 1, 2021 as the reference date. For Jammu and Kashmir and snow-bound areas of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, the reference date shall be the first day of October, 2020, the notification said. A pre-test of Census 2021, which began on August 12, will go on till the end of this month.