Now that Bihar has launched the first phase of caste-based counting, the NDA govt must shed its ambivalence about the matter
Post Date – 12:15 AM, Tue – 1/10/23
Now that Bihar has launched the first phase of caste-based counting, the NDA govt must shed its ambivalence about the matter
Ironically, despite the dominant role of caste in India’s social, economic and political life, there is still no reliable and comprehensive caste data. Reliable caste censuses are critical to ensuring social justice. Now that Bihar has taken the initiative and launched the first phase of caste-based counting, deploying close to 350,000 census takers, the NDA government must shed its ambivalence about the matter and take it up at the national level. Population by caste will help in fine-tuning the retention policy. It will highlight a host of issues that require attention in any democracy, particularly the number of people who are marginalized or disenfranchised. The resulting detailed data will enable policymakers to formulate better policies and implementation strategies. While the Constitution does not explicitly allow states to conduct censuses, it must be noted that the Supreme Court has identified quantifiable backwardness data as a key criterion for clearing caste quotas for jobs, education, and elected bodies at the state level. In this regard, the Telangana state government has been at the forefront of supporting the cause and has gotten the parliament to pass a resolution urging the Center to include caste-based census in its census work. Confusingly, however, the federal government objected to the caste-based census in a September 2021 Supreme Court filing, saying it would be administratively difficult and cumbersome. States such as Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra and Odisha are also keen to conduct caste surveys.
The caste census must be careful not to repeat the same mistakes that the socio-economic caste census data became unusable. Sufficient independent oversight is necessary to ensure that subtle differences in different regions or across linguistic caste groups are properly captured. Past attempts at caste-based censuses in some countries have not yielded much progress. The Siddaramaiah government in Karnataka launched India’s first state-level social and educational survey in 2014. But it was canceled ahead of the 2018 parliamentary elections. The investigation in Tamil Nadu, which was launched in 2020 after Vanniyar asked for a separate quota, is also in limbo. While the goal of any affirmative action program is to reduce socioeconomic inequality and lift vulnerable groups out of poverty, a critical element of this mission is accurate and factual data. There are good reasons for conducting a national caste census to identify socially, economically and educationally disadvantaged communities and increase retention in proportion to their population. No welfare program can be effective without reliable data. It is surprising that a country with such a large affirmative action program based on caste does not collect data on the educational and economic profiles of castes.
