Field supervision, correcting ‘discrepancies’ are normal practice in statistical exercise, says RG&CCI Director

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Government employees conduct a door-to-door survey for Census 2027. File | Photo Credit: ANI

An official from the office of Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India (RG&CCI) said on Friday (June 5, 2026) that that the House Listing Operation is still under way in Rajasthan and that the process of Census is multi-pronged.

Swadha Dev Singh, Director, RG&CCI, said in an e-mail that primarily, the enumerators collect data through house-to-house visits. “Supervisors and other senior Census functionaries conduct field inspections to see that enumerators have properly understood the concepts and correctly recorded data from the respondents. In case of any discrepancy, it is pointed out to enumerator for suitable modification. This is a normal practice in any administrative statistical exercise, which is followed in Census operations as well,” she said in response to a story published on June 4 — “Re-check ordered over ‘discrepancies’ in Census 2027 data”.

Ms. Singh added that “there have been some attempts to misrepresent this normal exercise as data tampering, which is regrettable and factually inaccurate”.

The Hindu spoke with enumerators in Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan who said that they were being asked to revisit households and correct the data “discrepancies”, particularly on issues such as open defecation and household access to electricity or cooking gas connections.

This is the first digital Census and enumerators, mostly government school teachers, are keying in the data through mobile Apps on their personal phones. The process can be monitored in real time by their superior officers.

On May 25, CG Box, a Raipur-based digital media platform, published a report, which said that school teachers in Chhattisgarh were being asked to edit the entries on open defecation and LPG connection after they had completed the survey of a household. Devesh Tiwari, who runs CG Box, said that several teachers had approached him stating they were being asked to edit the entries at