Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India

The Census organisation functions under the Ministry of Home Affairs of the Government of India. The post of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India is usually held by a civil servant holding the rank of Joint Secretary to Government of India.

The Indian Census is the largest single source of a variety of statistical information on different characteristics of the people of India.

The first census of India was conducted in the 1870s and attempted to collect data across as much of the country as was feasible. The first of the decennial censuses took place in 1881. Until 1961, responsibility for arranging, conducting and analysing the results of the census was exercised by a temporary administrative structure that was put in place for each census and then dismantled. From that time on, the office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India has existed as a permanent department of central government; each state and union territory has a supervisory Directorate of Census Operations.

Attempts to enumerate population in parts of the Indian subcontinent and, more important, to assess landholdings for revenue purposes, existed before the British Raj and are attested in writings such as those of Abu'l-Fazl ibn Mubarak and Muhnot Nainsi. The British East India Company, too, carried out quantitative exercises in various places and at various times. By 1871-72, when the Raj authorities conducted the first all-India census, the only administrative area of British India that had not already attempted to conduct a region-wide enumeration was Bengal Province.

The conduct of censuses in India by the British Raj administration significantly influenced the culture of the country. Peter Gottschalk says that:

... classifications of convenience for government officials transformed into contested identities for the Indian public as the census went from an enumerative exercise of the British government to an authoritative representation of the social body and a vital tool of indigenous interests. All of this pivoted on the fact that statistical comparison in British India relied upon a purportedly scientific classificatory system dissimilar to Indic antecedents yet similar to that of medieval Europe: focused on mutually exclusive, essence-defined, religious categories.

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