A special dedicated web portal will be launched for self-enumeration during the upcoming Census, which will be available for both phases of the national enumeration exercise, officials said Monday.

In the country’s first digital census, enumerators will collect the data of citizens using mobile applications on their smartphones, they said. It will also be the first time in the country that citizens will get a chance to self-enumerate through a dedicated web portal which will be available for both the phases of Census — Houselisting and Housing Census (HLO) and Population Enumeration.

“For the first time, technology will be used to collect data and send it electronically to the central server. This will result in early availability of Census data,” an official said. Reference date for the Census 2027 will be 00:00 hrs of March 1, 2027 and 00:00 hrs of October 1, 2026 for Union Territories of Ladakh and Jammu and Kashmir and snowbound non-synchronous areas of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand.