IPUMS-International is a global initiative begun in 1999 to preserve, integrate and disseminate sample extracts of the world’s census microdata. 97 official statistical agencies—including for India the Ministry of Statistics & Programme Implementation, but not the Office of the Registrar General—have endorsed the IPUMS-I protocols, encompassing 87% of the globe’s population. Researchers world-wide may download free of cost from www.ipums.org/international customtailored extracts of samples for more than two hundred censuses covering as many as five decades. Led by the University of Minnesota Population Center (MPC), the project is funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health (USA). Challenges faced by the project may be grouped into four types: financial, legal, technical and administrative. Specifically, our list of the most notable obstacles include: obtaining official consent, recovering data from old tapes, documenting the microdata, drawing, editing and confidentializing high-precision household samples, integrating the metadata and microdata, managing access to the microdata, promoting quality research, sharing fruits of the research, etc. Despite these challenges and more, each year the database grows with the addition of samples for 15-25 censuses, representing a half dozen or so countries. Currently, extracts of 212 samples, encompassing 69 countries and totaling over 480 million unit (person) records, are being disseminated to more than six thousand registered researchers world-wide. These figures are expected to double over the current decade. Meanwhile, a great outpouring of research has produced hundreds of publications, including a couple of dozen books and doctoral dissertations based in-whole or in-part on IPUMS-International integrated census samples. The censuses of India are not presently represented in the database--despite their fame and their distinguished history. The purpose of this paper is to stress the importance of integrating high precision samples of the 1991, 2001, and 2011 censuses of India into the IPUMS-International database. The paper concludes with a comparison of definitions and concepts in population censuses of India and 16 Asian countries already represented in the database. Our analysis of the 1991-2011 Indian censuses shows that they are second to none in terms of comprehensiveness as well as in detail and consistency of questions posed—all the more remarkable given that the censuses of India rank among the world’s largest peace-time, democratic undertakings.