The Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner (ORG&CC) is a permanent institution under the Union Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India, responsible for the systematic collection and analysis of demographic data. The post of Registrar General and Ex-Officio Census Commissioner was formally established in 1949 to create a permanent organisation for population statistics, replacing the previous ad-hoc arrangements for each census, which had been the practice since the first synchronous decennial Census in 1881. The institution was fully established in 1961.
The ORG&CC's primary mechanism is to conduct the decennial Census of India under the Census Act, 1948. This Act grants the Census Commissioner the authority to design schedules, supervise enumeration, and ensure the confidentiality of individual data. The office also implements the Registration of Births and Deaths (RBD) Act, 1969 (Act No. 18 of 1969), which mandates the compulsory registration of births and deaths across the country. Furthermore, it manages the Civil Registration System (CRS), the Sample Registration System (SRS) for vital statistics like Infant Mortality Rate (IMR), and the National Population Register (NPR) under the Citizenship Act, 1955.
A significant recent change is the amendment of the RBD Act, 1969, by the Registration of Births and Deaths (Amendment) Act, 2023 (Act 20 of 2023). This amendment mandates that the Registrar General of India will maintain a national database of registered births and deaths, and obligates state-level Chief Registrars to share their data with this central database. The upcoming Census, expected to be the Census 2027, is also planned as India's first "Digital Census" and will include the collection of caste data, a decision approved by the Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs on April 30, 2024.