NEW DELHI: Union home minister Amit Shah on Thursday soft-launched four digital tools and unveiled the mascots for Census 2027, “Pragati” (female) and “Vikas” (male).The mascots are meant to symbolise the equal participation of women and men in India’s journey toward becoming a developed nation by 2047.Developed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), the new digital platforms are designed to support the enumeration process for what will be the world’s largest census exercise.Scheduled to begin on April 1, 2026, Census 2027 will be conducted in two phases. The first phase, the house-listing and housing census, will run from April to September 2026, followed by the population enumeration phase in February 2027.For the first time, the national headcount will be conducted entirely through digital means. Citizens will also be able to self-enumerate online in 16 languages before enumerators begin door-to-door surveys.At the centre of the exercise will be the Census Management and Monitoring System (CMMS), a dedicated digital portal designed to coordinate one of the largest administrative operations in the world.The system will mark a major shift from traditional paper-based enumeration. Instead of clipboards and paper forms, field staff will use handheld devices, geotagged mapping tools and a centralised web-based monitoring platform.More than 3.2 million enumerators, supervisors and other field officials will be involved in the exercise across the country. Using handheld devices, they will collect detailed demographic, social and economic data from hundreds of millions of households.The data collected will be transmitted and processed through the CMMS platform, allowing it to be aggregated, validated and monitored in near real time, significantly reducing the time required for compilation and error correction.Census 2027 will be the 16th national census since Independence and the first to be conducted as a fully digital exercise with a self-enumeration option for citizens.The decadal census was originally scheduled for 2021, but was postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic.According to the Registrar General of India (RGI), citizens will be asked 33 questions during the first phase of the exercise, which focuses on house-listing and housing details.