Rewriting Rule 5: How a Court Setback Became a Requisition Power for India's First Digital Census

The Power Was Always There. The Safeguards Were Not.

The legal power to draft private-school teachers into the Census was not created on 16 October. Section 4 of the Census Act, 1948 has long allowed governments to appoint persons as Census officers and Section 11 penalises those who refuse. Section 27 of the Right to Education Act, 2009 bars the use of teachers for non-educational work, but it makes three exceptions and the decennial Census is one of them.

What the amendment to Rule 5 of the Census Rules, 1990 adds is clarity. It names teachers of aided and unaided private institutions and members of societies and trusts, inside a category that previously said only "any person."

Why the Courts Paused It

That vagueness mattered. During the House Listing phase, private-school teachers in Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and Haryana challenged State orders assigning them enumeration duty. In May 2026, the Bombay High Court gave interim protection to associations representing more than 500 private unaided and minority schools in Maharashtra.

It stayed notices, appointment orders and coercive steps, including FIRs, against staff who did not report. On 16 October, the day of the notification, the Punjab and Haryana High Court stayed two Haryana government communications seeking teachers' details.

The courts were not denying that the Census is a sovereign duty. They were asking where the State's reach ends when it extends into institutions it does not employ. The executive's response was to rewrite the rule, not to persuade the institutions concerned.

The

Rule as Written, the Rule in Practice On paper, the amendment closes the ambiguity. In practice, it leaves three gaps open.

• Teaching time: In Election Commission of India v. St. Mary's School (2008), the Supreme Court accepted that teachers may be deployed for election and Census work under these statutory exceptions, but required that such duty be scheduled so it does not disrupt teaching. The amended rule widens who may be deployed. It says nothing about when.
• Compensation and consent: The Act sets out a penalty for refusing. It sets out no comparable framework for paying staff of unaided institutions, which receive no state funds or for consulting their managements.
• Data on personal devices: The 40-question schedule includes caste beyond SC and ST and enumerators will record answers on their own phones. A Census official has said the data is centralised with adequate checks and deleted from the device once the task is done. Section 15 protects the confidentiality of the record. It was written in 1948 and does not deal with the phone in a private teacher's pocket.

What Remains Unsettled

The interim stays in Maharashtra and Haryana were directed at State executive orders. Whether an amended central rule simply overrides them or must still meet the standards the High Courts were applying, is a question those courts will now have to decide.

For GS2, the lesson is broader than the Census. When delegated legislation is used to respond to judicial caution, the legal basis improves but the governance questions remain. A Census that depends on 34 lakh people, many of them conscripted from private institutions, needs consent, compensation and data accountability written into the rules, not just a broader definition of who may be called.