The Chief Minister's Office of Himachal Pradesh on Wednesday shared the schedule for the second phase of the upcoming national Census, flagging staggered dates for snow-bound and non-snow-bound regions of the hill state. The post, attributed to Chief Minister Thakur Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu, urged citizens to participate actively in what it called a national exercise.

According to the post, population enumeration in inaccessible snow-bound areas of Himachal Pradesh will be conducted from 11 to 30 September 2026, while other areas will be covered from 9 to 28 February 2027. 'Let us together actively participate in this national exercise,' the message read, originally posted in Hindi as 'आइए, मिलकर इस राष्ट्रीय कार्य में सक्रिय भागीदारी निभाएँ'.

Context

Himachal Pradesh's terrain ranges from the lower Shivaliks to the high-altitude trans-Himalayan belts of Lahaul-Spiti, Kinnaur, Pangi and upper Kullu, several of which remain cut off for months due to heavy snowfall. Conducting any large household-level exercise in these pockets requires deployment before winter sets in, typically by late September.

The Chief Minister's note signals that the state administration is aligning its outreach with the central Census calendar, asking residents and field staff alike to prepare for the enumeration window.

Policy backdrop

The Census of India is a decennial exercise conducted by the Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner under the Ministry of Home Affairs. The last completed count was in 2011; the 2021 round was indefinitely postponed during the COVID-19 pandemic, leaving India without a fresh population baseline for over a decade.

Preparatory work, including delimitation of enumeration blocks and training of enumerators, has been under way since 2023. The exercise traditionally follows a two-phase format — house-listing and housing census first, followed by population enumeration in the second phase. States with difficult terrain such as Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Jammu and Kashmir typically receive earlier, staggered windows to account for seasonal inaccessibility.

Stakeholders and impact

The dates, as conveyed in the post, will directly affect residents of remote Himalayan valleys whose households often go undercounted because of weather-driven delays. Accurate enumeration in these pockets feeds into welfare entitlements, electoral rolls and central transfers tied to population data.

For the state machinery, the window means that district administrations, panchayati raj institutions and trained enumerators will need to be mobilised well in advance — particularly in the September 2026 snow-zone phase, where the operational margin before the first heavy snow is narrow. Schoolteachers, who form the bulk of the enumerator pool in hill districts, are likely to be central to the deployment.

What's next

The state's plans hinge on formal notifications from the Registrar General of India confirming the first-phase house-listing dates and the national rollout calendar. Operational guidelines on whether enumerators will use digital data-collection tools, and how the exercise interfaces with the National Population Register, are also expected closer to the schedule.

For Himachal Pradesh, a clean and timely count would be the first granular population picture of the state since 2011 — a dataset that will shape resource allocation, constituency-level planning and disaster-preparedness mapping in a state where geography drives governance.