New Delhi, September 23: In the backdrop of demands raised by the Registrar General of India (RGI) officials to switch to electronic modes for collating population data, Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Monday announced that census 2021 would be carried out through mobile app. Speaking at an official event, Shah said the time has come to transform from paper census to "digital census". Uttarakhand Joins NRC Chorus After Assam Publishes Final Citizens Roll: List of States Mooting Drive to Weed Out Illegal Immigrants.

The Home Minister's push for digital census comes days after senior personnel at the RGI -- the state agency entrusted with the strenuous task of nationwide demographic data collection -- had called for a transformation to electronic mode of data collation as manually loading them into the system could turn out to be a cumbersome exercise, owing to the massive population size of the nation. Monkey Census in Delhi For First Time To Gauge Trouble Created by The Animal.

In a validation to their concern, Shah made an official announcement today saying,  "Mobile app will be used in Census 2021. It will be a transformation from paper census to digital census."

Shah further added that the census exercise is crucial for the nation for various reasons, as it not only determines the population strength, but also the socio-economic details which aid the government in formulating policies and allocating resources.

"Population census is not a boring exercise. It is an exercise that helps to provide people the benefits of the government schemes. National Population Register (NPR) will help government solve many issues in the country," he said.

At an RGI conference in April this year, the then Union Home Secretary Rajiv Gauba had stated that around 33 lakh enumerators would be deployed across the nation for data collection purpose. The reference date for census in Jammu & Kashmir, and snowbound regions of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand will be October 1, 2020. For rest of the nation, the reference date will be March 1, 2021, Gauba had said.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Sep 23, 2019 12:24 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).