For population enumeration purpose Rs. 2.47 million blocks have been made to count population of approximately 240 million households. For enumeration, 29 questions have been devised on demographic, marital status, cultural, literacy, economic, migration, travel to place of work and fertility parameters. Certain new features have been added to the 2011 census. These include, state of art designing of the schedules; new/revised questions on the institutional house hold, new category in gender parameter; a separate code for separated and divorced; new codes under status of school attendance and a separate code included under non economic activity. Census 2011 has also introduced new initiatives to sensitise school students about census operations. A toll free number and services of call centre have been introduced for grievances from public.

Census 2011 will be using more developed ICR technology with advanced features so as to ensure faster completion of work and bringing down to 1-2 years, the time taken to complete this process from 4-5 years in 2001. The omission rate of 1.7 per cent in census conducted in 2001 was well within international norms, but the effort this time is to further reduce this rate.

In the first phase, house listing & housing census and collection of data on National Population Register(NPR) was done in the first phase from April to September 2010.