The Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner, India (ORGI) is a permanent institution and a statutory authority operating under the Union Ministry of Home Affairs. The organization was established as a permanent department of the central government in 1961, replacing the temporary administrative structure that was set up for each census until then. A permanent organization, headed by the Registrar General and Ex-Officio Census Commissioner, was first created in 1949 to systematically collect data on India's population. This solved the problem of ad-hoc arrangements for the decennial Census, the first synchronous one of which was conducted in 1881.
The ORGI's core mechanism is conducting the decennial Census of India under the provisions of the Census Act, 1948. It also implements the Civil Registration System (CRS), which mandates the compulsory registration of births and deaths under the Registration of Births and Deaths (RBD) Act, 1969. Furthermore, the ORGI maintains the National Population Register (NPR), a database of usual residents, under the Citizenship Act, 1955 and Citizenship Rules, 2003. The office also conducts the Sample Registration System (SRS) for vital statistics and the Linguistic Survey of India.
A significant recent change is the Registration of Births and Deaths (Amendment) Act, 2023, which mandates that all reported births and deaths from October 1, 2023, must be digitally registered through the Centre's CRS portal. The upcoming Census 2027 will be India's first "Digital Census" and will include comprehensive caste enumeration, a practice last undertaken in 1931.