Census 2027: Kolkata ropes in 1,000 schools for West Bengal’s first digital census

Kolkata: With the first digital census in West Bengal starting on August 1, Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) will rope in 700 government schools and 300 private schools from class VIII-XII, where students will be part of the drive with at least 10 self- enumerations.

“Our state's first digital census, which is being called Census 2027, will start from tomorrow,” Kolkata Municipal Commissioner Smita Pandey said.

For the past 10 days, a media campaign on social media platforms have been run to appeal to the citizens in three languages—Hindi, English, and Bengali. The first phase starts tomorrow and will continue until August 15 while the second phase will start on August 16 and continue until September 14. In phase 1, Self enumeration (SE) and continue till August 15. The Fill details online on se.census.gov.in and a 11 digit SE ID will be provided.


In phase 2 - Field enumeration phase from 16 Aug till 14 Sept where SE ID provided will be uploaded on field enumerators app.

“During the self-enumeration, through a link, one can fill out their details. Following that, an 11-digit SEID (Self-Enumeration ID), which one needs to keep. When the field enumeration phase begins, the enumerator comes to your house, you can give them SEID. The Enumerator can immediately auto-fetch the self-enumeration data to complete the work,” Pandey said. The census will be declared on March 1st, 2027.

“For Kolkata, we will have 8,200 enumerators, which includes 1,400 supervisors. Two-phase training has already been completed by all enumerators and supervisors,” Pandey added.

“Since the census is a very important lifetime event, we want to involve school students in this. We want children to motivate their parents to complete the self-enumeration. We are targeting children from Class 8 to 12. We have sent requests to school education departments. We are involving about 300 reputed private schools in Kolkata and 700 government and government-aided schools. We have given them a pledge letter to pledge that they will do self-enumeration,” Pandey said.

Census Prefect in Schools
A unique concept will be started for these schools. KMC has taken a "nodal census teacher" who will stay in touch with our borough managers. “We have requested headmasters of classes VIII—XII to appoint a census prefect,” she added.

Self-enumeration is family-centric (you are enrolling your family, not just yourself. If every child does it for 10 families, we can move very far ahead in the self-enumeration phase.

Pandey said that they have requested CREDAI and other Traders Associations.

In slums and colonies, KMC will run special drive in the first phase. “We will still try to reach out to them and encourage them so they also participate, allowing us to capture a good percentage. We are also encouraging high-rise societies to complete it,” she added.

A Helpdesk will be launched in every borough. “We are setting up help desks in every borough with 5 teams per borough. Since we don't have field enumeration yet, these teams will create awareness. In 2011, Kolkata's population was around 4.5 million and we can assume it has grown to around 5.5 million now. If we can reach even 2.5-3 million of through self-enumeration, the major workload will reduce when field enumeration actually begins, she said.