Census 2027 tech ops likely to be outsourced
The Registrar General of India plans to outsource IT services for Census 2027, with a budget of ₹50 crore, focusing on data security and management.
The Registrar General of India (RGI) is looking to outsource its overall operations and maintenance of IT services, including cyber security, for the Census 2027, people familiar with the development said, adding that the contract will be restricted to central public sector units (CPSUs).
A request for proposal (RFP) in this regard has recently been issued by the RGI and the government is expected to spend around ₹50 crore for the data security and other related IT services.
Once selected, the concerned company will manage the IT infrastructure including the RGI’s National Data Centre in Delhi and two disaster recovery sites at Lucknow and Bengaluru for three years.
“The IT services will be outsourced to a CPSU to provide managed services to maintain the National Data Centre (NDC) and two Disaster Recovery Site (DRS) - Lucknow and Bengaluru - hosting online census applications. These data centres have the latest technology using state of art compute, storage, network and security and are already properly secured using state of art technology including next generation firewall, DDoS protection, patch management, endpoint protection and web application firewall,” said an officer.
This person said “security of the Census data of 1.5 billion people, houselisting and related information is important”.
A SOC (Security Operation Centre) team, which consists of both security analysts and engineers, will oversee all activity on servers, databases, networks, applications, websites and other systems for the sole purpose of pinpointing potential security threats and thwarting them as quickly as possible, according to a second officer.
“The primary duty of the SOC is to protect the Census organisation against cyberattacks. The analysts will dig into a potential incident to determine if it is a real attack or not,” said the second officer.
Census 2027, for which field exercise will formally begin from April 1 next year, was announced by the ministry of home affairs (MHA) in June this year. A notification for intent to conduct the decadal exercise was issued on June 16
In its first circular for Census-2027, RGI last month directed its field offices across states and UTs to send details of changes in administrative boundaries since 2010 and ensure that such changes, down to the ward- and village-level are updated ahead of the Census.
The 16th Census, which was delayed due to Covid-19 pandemic, will be conducted in two phases. In phase one i.e. house-listing operation (HLO), the housing conditions, assets and amenities of each household will be collected. Subsequently, in the second phase i.e. population enumeration (PE), the demographic, socio-economic, cultural and other details of every person in each household will be collected.
The much-delayed Census, which will include caste enumeration, will be completed by March 1, 2027. Officials have said that while the data collection would be over by March 1, 2027, the entire exercise to collate the data and publish it will take two to three years.
The ministry of home affairs has said that the 16th Census will see involvement of about 3.4 million enumerators and supervisors.
It also said that the upcoming census “will be conducted through digital means using mobile applications” and “provision of self-enumeration would also be made available to the people”.
