Centre Designates Data Centres as Critical Information Infrastructure Ahead of Census 2027

Ahead of India’s first fully digital Census, the Union Ministry of Home Affairs has formally declared the data centres and digital systems underpinning the Census 2027 exercise as ‘Critical Information Infrastructure’ (CII), placing them under the highest tier of cybersecurity protection available in the country.

In its notification, the government declared the computer resources relating to the Census Management and Monitoring System (CMMS), the Self-Enumeration portal, the Civil Registration System (CRS) web portals, and mobile applications for house listing, population enumeration, and National Population Register (NPR) updation as CII of the Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India.

Linked databases, including the NPR, census, and CRS databases, along with computer resources at the National Data Centre in Delhi and its disaster recovery sites, have also been brought under the CII designation.

A chosen central Public Sector Undertaking will manage the National Data Centre in Delhi and two disaster recovery sites in Lucknow and Bengaluru, with a three-year contract covering infrastructure, applications, and security. Advanced tools such as next-generation firewalls, DDoS protection, patch management, and endpoint security will be deployed.

The declaration invokes powers under the Information Technology Act, 2000 (Amended 2008), which defines CII as any computer resource whose incapacitation or destruction would have a debilitating impact on national security, economy, public health, or safety.

The CII declaration also reflects India's rapidly evolving data centre landscape. India's total data centre capacity has grown from roughly 375 MW in 2020 to around 1,500 MW by 2025, according to the Ministry of Electronics and IT, with approximately 38,231 GPUs onboarded under the national AI compute framework to support startups, researchers, and academic institutions.

The Scale of the Task

Census 2027 will be India's first fully digital headcount, powered by the CMMS, a dedicated web-based platform designed to manage one of the world's largest administrative exercises. At its core, 3.2 million field functionaries, enumerators, and supervisors will capture granular demographic, social, and economic data from hundreds of millions of households using handheld devices, transmitting it to central servers in real time.

The Union Cabinet approved ₹11,718 crore for the exercise, which will include caste enumeration for the first time. The Census will be conducted in two phases: House Listing and Housing Census from April to September 2026, and Population Enumeration in February 2027.

The CII designation comes against a backdrop of alarming cyber threat levels. India ranks second globally among targets for cyberattacks. The Data Security Council of India (DSCI) reported that the country detected an average of 761 cyberattack attempts per minute in 2024, with over 500 million attacks occurring in just the first quarter of that year alone.

Registrar General Mritunjay Kumar Narayan emphasised in a statement that individual data collected for Census 2027 will be kept strictly confidential under Section 15 of the Census Act, 1948, and cannot be accessed under the Right to Information Act or presented as evidence in court. Only aggregate numbers will be used for tabulation.