NEW DELHI: Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge and Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi have jointly urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to withdraw the government’s existing caste census questionnaire, stating that its open-ended format could render the exercise inaccurate and undermine efforts to ensure social justice.
In a letter to Modi, the two Congress leaders stressed that a credible assessment of the population and socio-economic status of India’s caste groups is possible only if caste enumeration is carried out systematically and uniformly across the country.
“Your government has chosen an open-ended question format to record caste information in the Census, which is misleading. Under this system, the caste name provided by each individual will simply be recorded as stated,” the letter said.
They also criticised the decision to allow respondents to enter their caste names freely, saying the same caste may be identified by different names, sub-castes and linguistic variations in different regions. According to them, such an approach could result in the same community being recorded under thousands of different names, making the final data difficult to consolidate and use.
The Congress leaders said inaccurate caste figures could have far-reaching consequences for backward, extremely backward and other disadvantaged communities, and “may also influence decisions related to education, employment, government schemes and social justice”. They also questioned whether the proposed exercise would establish the actual population of Other Backward Classes (OBCs), pointing out that the term “Backward Classes” itself is not included in the census process.
Kharge and Gandhi reminded the government that “an easy solution already exists” and proposed a standardised drop-down list of castes, similar to the system used for enumerating Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. They said such a list could be prepared using existing government records, including Socially and Educationally Backward Classes (SEBC) lists, along with data available with the Anthropological Survey of India.
Citing caste surveys conducted in Telangana and Bihar, Kharge and Gandhi said similar standardised lists had been used in those states. They urged the government to withdraw the existing questionnaire and formulate a new one after consultations with political parties, experts and the public.
The objective, they said, should be to ensure that every caste and community is accurately counted so that the caste census produces reliable, meaningful data capable of informing policies on social justice and equitable representation.
Meanwhile, addressing a press conference here, Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh alleged that the manner in which the caste census is being conducted amounts to a “betrayal of the people”. He urged the government to adopt the methodology used in Bihar and Telangana for a nationwide caste census.
