The Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner (ORGI) is a permanent institution and official Census organisation under the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), Government of India. Its primary function is to arrange, conduct, and analyse the results of demographic surveys, most notably the decennial Census of India.
The problem it solved was the ad-hoc nature of census operations; before 1961, the census was conducted by a temporary administrative structure that was dismantled after each count. The permanent office was formally established in 1961 to ensure a systematic and continuous collection of statistics. The legal foundation for its core function is the Census Act, 1948, which was passed on September 3, 1948.
The mechanism is governed by the Census Act, 1948, which empowers the Central Government to appoint the Census Commissioner and staff. A key provision is the mandatory confidentiality of individual data, which is protected and cannot be used for non-census purposes or be admissible in a court of law. Conversely, Section 8(2) of the Act legally binds citizens to provide accurate information to the best of their knowledge.
The ORGI connects to the Registration of Births and Deaths Act, 1969, which it is responsible for implementing, and the Citizenship Act, 1955, under which the National Population Register (NPR) is developed. Census data is critical for policy planning by bodies like NITI Aayog and for the delimitation of Lok Sabha constituencies.
The office and its functions have seen recent changes: the upcoming Census is the first digital census and the first to allow self-enumeration. Furthermore, it is set to include a comprehensive caste enumeration, a practice last undertaken in 1931. The Registration of Births and Deaths Act, 1969 was also amended in 2023.