The Odisha government, on Tuesday, announced that the house listing exercise of Census 2027 is scheduled to start from mid-April, a notification read.
The notification issued by the Revenue and Disaster Management department said that the one-month-long house listing operations will be carried out across the state from April 16 to May 15, 2026.
“During the period of 30 days with an option for self-enumeration, which shall be conducted in 15 days’ time period between April 1, 2026 to April 15, 2026, just before the start of house-to-house listing operations,” the notification stated.
Nearly one lakh people will be engaged in enumeration in Odisha, and each official will cover around 200 households. One supervisor will monitor the work of six enumerators. Enumerators will be paid an incentive of Rs 25,000 for their services, sources said.
Hemanta Kumar Singh, Joint Director of State Census Operations, speaking to news agency ANI, said that the state will deploy one lakh enumerators for the process. This iteration of the census marks a significant shift as it will be conducted entirely through a digital mobile application.
He said, “The revenue department of the state government has published the notification about the census for the housing listing operations of the Census 2027 to take place between April 16 and May 15, 2026. One lakh enumerators will be engaged in the process. On January 23, our Director and Chief Secretary will be attending a conference in New Delhi. We have completed almost all the jurisdictional changes. There will be no paperwork, and all the operations will be digital.”
“This is the first phase of the operation, which will start on April 16. The officers will ask 34 questions and fill them out on the mobile app. The second phase of the census will start in February 2027, when we will start population enumeration. Caste census will also be conducted during this phase,” Singh added.
Earlier in December 2025, the Union Cabinet approved Census 2027 with an allocated budget of Rs 11,718.24 crore. According to a press release by the Cabinet, the census will be conducted in two stages – the House listing and Housing Census, which will run from April to September 2026, followed by Population Enumeration (PE) in February 2027.
For the Union Territories of Ladakh and snow-bound non-synchronous areas of Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, the PE will be conducted in September 2026.
A mobile app will be used for data collection, and a Central portal for monitoring purposes. Under the “Census-as-a-service” (CaaS) model, the gathered data will be provided to various ministries in organised, machine-readable, and actionable formats.
Census 2027 will be the 16th census in the country and the eighth after independence.
