Teachers from private institutions, government clerks, bank officials and any other “suitable” persons can be appointed as enumerators for the ongoing population census, the Centre said in a notification on Friday.
Earlier, the practice was to assign the task largely to government teachers and local authority staff.
Friday’s notification, which amends the rules, came after the Haryana Progressive Schools Conference moved Punjab and Haryana High Court challenging the requisition and deployment of teachers from private, unaided schools for the census.
On October 8, Justice Harpreet Singh Brar stayed the operation of two Haryana government communications that sought the details of teachers available for census duty. The matter has been listed for April 29 next year.
A gazette notification from the Registrar General of India (RGI), Mrityunjay Kumar Narayan, on Friday said the Centre had amended the Census Rules, 1990, that said “teachers, clerks, or any official or any person” can be appointed as census enumerators by state and Union Territory authorities.
“Teachers of any educational institution of the government, local authority, aided or unaided private bodies, societies or trusts; (ii) clerks or any official of the central government, state government, local authority or establishment (including public sector undertakings, statutory bodies, banks, companies, institutions, societies and trusts); (iii) any person, as the state government or the Union Territory administration may consider suitable” can be appointed as census enumerators, the notification said.
The Haryana Progressive Schools Conference had argued that Section 4A of the Census Act, 1948, covered officials and staff of “local authorities”, a category that it said did not include private, unaided schools. The government, it contended, could not expand the law’s scope through administrative communications.
The current population census, the eighth since Independence, is being conducted in two phases: (a) house-listing and housing census, conducted between April and September this year; and (b) population enumeration and caste census.
The population enumeration in Goa, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and Uttarakhand (other than the snow-bound regions) will take place between December 1 and January 4, ahead of Assembly elections in these states.
In the rest of the country, the exercise is likely to begin in February. Data on various demographic, socio-cultural and economic parameters will be collected from households, including migration and fertility details.
An RGI notification last month said the Centre had deferred the house-listing operations in Manipur, which has been in the grip of ethnic violence since May 2023.
House-listing in Ladakh and the snow-bound areas of Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand took place between September 1 and 30.
The decadal population census was to be conducted by 2021 but was postponed because of the Covid outbreak. The Centre has approved ₹11,718 crore for the exercise.