Definition
Household
A 'household' in Census is usually a group of persons who normally live together and take their meals from a common kitchen unless the exigencies of work prevent any of them from doing so. Persons in a household may be related or unrelated or a mix of both. However, if a group of unrelated persons live in a census house but do not take their meals from the common kitchen, then they are not constituent of a common household. Each such person was to be treated as a separate household. There may be one member households, two member households or multi-member households.
A household with at least one Scheduled Caste member is treated as Scheduled Caste Household. Similarly, a household having at least one Scheduled Tribe member is treated as a Scheduled Tribe household.
Institutional Household
A group of unrelated persons who live in an institution and take their meals from a common kitchen is called an Institutional Household. Boarding houses, messes, hostels, hotels, rescue homes, observation homes, beggar homes, jails, ashrams, orphanages, old age homes, children homes etc. are all covered in this type of household. To make the definition more clearly perceptible to the enumerators at the Census 2011, it was specifically mentioned that this category of households would cover only those households where a group of unrelated persons live in an institution and share a common kitchen.
In an Institutional Household, the families of the warden and peon etc. living in separate houses and cooking for themselves separately are treated as separate normal households.
Houseless Households
Households who do not live in buildings or census houses but live in the open on roadside, pavements, in hume pipes, under fly-over's and staircases, in the open in places of worship, mandaps, railway platforms, etc. are treated as Houseless households.
