The Registrar General of India (RGI) is a permanent institution and the top authority for managing demographic surveys and civil registration in the country. It functions as the Ex-Officio Census Commissioner of India and operates under the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA). The office was formally established in 1949 and became a permanent department of the central government in 1961. This institutionalization solved the problem of relying on ad hoc administrative structures for each decennial census, which had been the practice since the first synchronous census in 1881.
The RGI's primary mechanism is conducting the decennial Population and Housing Census under the Census Act, 1948. It also oversees the Civil Registration System (CRS), which mandates the compulsory registration of births and deaths under the Registration of Births and Deaths (RBD) Act, 1969. The RGI is also responsible for the Sample Registration System (SRS), which provides continuous data on fertility and mortality rates, and for managing the National Population Register (NPR), which is developed under the Citizenship Act, 1955. A significant recent change is the amendment to the RBD Act, 1969 in 2023, which mandates the online registration of all births and deaths on a central portal. Furthermore, the upcoming Census 2027 is planned to be India's first "Digital Census," utilizing mobile applications for data collection.