Institutional Household UPSC relevant
An institutional household is a group of unrelated persons who live in an institution and take their meals from a common kitchen. Census examples include boarding houses, messes, hostels, hotels, rescue homes, jails, ashrams and orphanages.
The defining features are institutional living arrangements and the absence of family relationship as the organising principle. Institutional households are listed during houselisting and their members are individually enumerated during Population Enumeration, but they are excluded from the Census 2027 self-enumeration option — an enumerator must canvass them directly. The category matters for interpreting local data: areas with large hostels, jails or army messes can show unusual age-sex structures, and institutional population is tabulated separately from the normal-household population in census outputs.