There remains little excuse to continually delay the decennial Census, an exercise that has been conducted without fail from 1881 to 2011. Yet, the deadline to freeze administrative boundaries of districts, tehsils, towns and municipal bodies — a prerequisite before the conduct of the Census — lapsed on June 30 this year. This deadline has been extended 10 times since 2019. Several public schemes such as the National Food Security Act, the National Social Assistance Programme and the delimitation of constituencies are dependent upon the Census being conducted. Besides, statistical surveys that go into setting policy such as those related to household and social consumption, the National Family Health Survey, the Periodic Labour Force Survey, and the Sample Registration System, among others, use the Census to set their sampling frames. With the 2011 Census data getting increasingly out-dated and phenomena such as migration across and within States, the urbanisation of Indian societies, and the suburbanisation of cities becoming increasingly prominent in recent years, the lack of a Census is telling. The reliance on a bevy of sample surveys to fill in the gap is only resulting in debates over methodology and conclusions based on cherry-picking according to one’s political choice. Clearly, the Union government must stop being derelict in its duties and should proceed with the Census quickly.