In Kerala, the enumerators will carry out house visits for the Houselisting and Housing census from July 1 to July 30. Before this 30-day period, there will also be an option for ‘self-enumeration’ where the respondents can enter the details online on their own.
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A little over 70,000 enumerators and supervisors will be pressed into service in Kerala for the Houselisting and Housing Census, which forms the first phase of Census 2027.
The number includes 10,000 supervisors and around 60,000 enumerators, the vast majority of them teachers drawn from schools in the State, Census officials said. The sessions for training them to use the special digital app designed for the work are expected to kick off on Friday (May 29, 2026).
Self-enumeration option
In Kerala, the enumerators will carry out house visits for the Houselisting and Housing census from July 1 to July 30. Before this 30-day period, there will also be an option for ‘self-enumeration’ where the respondents can enter the details online on their own. For Kerala, this period will be from June 16 to June 30.
According to the Census officials, the Houselisting and Housing census phase will cover information on housing conditions, availability of amenities and assets possessed by households. This phase will also set down the essential framework for the ‘Population Enumeration,’ the Phase II planned in February 2027.
Officials attached to the Directorate of Census Operations (Kerala) in Thiruvananthapuram said that the enumerators and supervisors will be trained in three-day sessions, each session catering to batches of about 50 people. “Supervisors have been mostly drawn from higher secondary school teachers, and enumerators from primary and high school teachers,” a Census official in Thiruvananthapuram told The Hindu on Wednesday (May 27, 2026).
As Kerala has a high literacy rate, Census officials are anticipating a good response to the ‘self-enumeration’ option.
A sizeable section of the enumerators are women, given their large presence in primary and high schools. Earlier, master trainers had trained 1,120 field trainers who will now lead the sessions.
First digital census
Census 2027 will be the country’s first ‘digital census.’ Four digital tools will be used in Phase 1—the Houselisting Block Creator (HLBC) web application, HLO Mobile Application, the Self-Enumeration portal, and the Census Management and Monitoring System (CMMS) portal. Earlier, the State was carved into houselisting blocks (HLB)—the smallest administrative unit for this phase of the Census.
In Kerala, there are roughly 60,000 HLBs—one per enumerator—but the number is likely to see an increase depending on the workload.
Published – May 27, 2026 06:13 pm IST
