Census process to resume 'very soon', confirms Amit Shah

NEW DELHI: Union home minister Amit Shah on Tuesday said Waqf Amendment Bill, currently being examined by a joint parliamentary committee, is committed to management, protection and prevention of misuse of Waqf properties and will be brought to Parliament for approval "in the coming days".
The assertion that the bill will be tabled soon makes light of the stiff resistance put up by opposition as well as Muslim outfits to the proposed legislation, dubbed by them as an indirect attempt to seize control of and sell Waqf properties.
On attempts at mobilisation of popular opinion against the bill through a 'QR code' campaign, Shah, who was addressing a press conference on 100 days of Modi govt 3.0, said it is for the parliamentary committee to take a decision on hearing genuine grievances of those supporting or opposing the bill and dealing with the mass programmes against the bill. The panel, which has held four meetings so far on the bill, is due to meet more domain experts and stakeholders, including All India Muslim Personal Law Board, on Sept 18, 19 and 20.
Shah also confirmed govt's intent to resume the process for census, on hold since 2020 due to Covid-19, "very soon", as well as Centre's desire to implement 'one nation-one election' "in the current term" of govt. Avoiding a direct reply to whether caste will be recorded in the upcoming census, he said "these details will be known to all when announcement of holding the census is made".
Incidentally, no provision was made for Census in 2024-25 Budget.
However, this is unlikely to be a constraint, were govt to go ahead with the exercise in the current fiscal.
Census by convention is conducted between April and early March of next year in two stages, namely, housing and houselisting operations, which are conducted alongside National Population Register (NPR) updation, and population enumeration, done from Feb 9 to 28.
A pre-test is done 6-7 months before start of census; this, for census 2021, was done in 2019, though the procedure has since been revised by introducing self-enumeration facility and digital capturing of data through Census app and portal.