An 83-year-old woman from a Himalayan border village and a homestay owner who filed his own census details on a smartphone — these are the two faces of India's long-awaited new census that Prime Minister Narendra Modi chose to highlight in his monthly Mann Ki Baat broadcast, and Uttarakhand Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami wasted no time amplifying the moment on Sunday, 27 September 2026. In his post, CM Dhami noted that the Prime Minister specifically mentioned Mana village in Chamoli district as the site where census enumeration began in Uttarakhand — and spotlighted Smt. Poornima Rawat, 83, a resident of that village, as a symbol of citizen participation in the historic exercise. Mana, perched near the Indo-Tibetan border, holds strategic and cultural significance as one of the country's northernmost inhabited villages.

Bagori's digital moment: a homestay owner goes self-enumeration

The second example Modi highlighted — and Dhami proudly echoed — came from Bagori village in Uttarkashi district. Hardev Singh Rana, who runs a homestay there, registered his own census information digitally without waiting for an enumerator to knock on his door. That single act distils the ambition behind the new census design: move India away from the clipboard-and-paper model of past decades toward a system where citizens can feed their own data into an official portal.

Why the 2026 Census is a watershed — and why Uttarakhand is leading

India's last completed decennial census was conducted in 2011. The 2021 round was postponed because of the COVID-19 pandemic and has still not been completed until now, leaving policymakers, welfare schemes, and infrastructure planning without fresh demographic data for over a decade. The current exercise is the first to formally incorporate digital self-enumeration — a shift announced in principle as far back as 2019 — making the stories from Chamoli and Uttarkashi more than feel-good vignettes. They are proof-of-concept from some of the country's most geographically challenging terrain. That Modi chose Uttarakhand-specific examples in a nationally broadcast programme underscores the state's role as an early and visible participant in the phased rollout. For CM Dhami, it is also a political moment: the state's mountain villages, often portrayed as difficult to reach, are here cast as frontrunners in a modernisation drive.

What the Mann Ki Baat mention means for the census rollout

A mention in Mann Ki Baat carries weight beyond radio airtime. The programme routinely serves as a soft-launch platform for citizen-facing initiatives, normalising participation before formal campaigns ramp up. By placing an elderly woman from a border village and a rural homestay operator at its centre, the broadcast — and Dhami's amplification of it — sends a clear signal to the rest of Uttarakhand's districts: the bar for digital participation has already been cleared by your neighbours. The immediate watch-point is how quickly the digital enumeration process scales from these pilot stories to the full state — and whether the self-enumeration portal holds up as enumerations move from remote Himalayan villages into urban centres. If Poornima Rawat's Mana can do it, the expectation is that no district has an excuse not to.