The Congress party is the latest to join the bandwagon of political parties demanding inclusion of caste in India’s census. The demand is not new and has been made earlier as well, starting with the Mandal Commission, which requested the Ministry of Home Affairs to include caste in the 1981 census. Since then, this demand has been made every time the country prepares to conduct a new census. While this was rejected in the previous three exercises, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government agreed to enumerate the caste in 2011, but not as part of the population census.
Caste as a category was enumerated as part of a nationwide Socio-Economic Caste Census (SECC) in 2011-12 to identify beneficiaries for various government programmes. SECC has since been adopted by most government programmes, including identification of beneficiaries under the National Food Security Act, which has a safety net of almost universal coverage and is India’s largest government scheme. As part of the SECC, which is a census exercise, data on caste was collected but kept separate from other socioeconomic indicators.
The government constituted a committee headed by Arvind Panagariya to analyze the data on caste from the SECC. Unfortunately, there has been no progress since then and the data has not been released. While the official explanation has been that the data-set is unreliable, this has been denied by the Registrar General’s Office to a parliamentary committee. The error rate of the data was found to be only 1.1%. In fact, this is not the only caste census data that has been neglected. A similar effort was made in Karnataka, which conducted its caste census in 2017. However, the results of that census have also not been released. Another caste census is currently underway in Bihar, and its results are likely to be available later this year.
Governments have been reluctant to enumerate caste as part of our census. And even in cases where such enumeration has been done, there is a reluctance to release basic estimates of population by caste. It is not that the Census of India has not been enumerating castes and has not been publishing detailed tables on the basis of that regularly. These are available for Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST). The problem lies with the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) and the residual category of ‘others’, which includes the general castes (mainly the upper castes, ie). The demand has gained significance even after a Supreme Court judgment in 2022 made empirical estimates of different castes conditional for reservation in local bodies.
The percentage of seats reserved for the social groups of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes is in proportion to the share of these groups in the population of the country. However, this is not the case for the OBC group, for which the reservation quota was arbitrarily fixed at 27% to ensure that the total quantum of reservation does not exceed 50%. This arbitrary quota has been opposed by OBC leaders, who are demanding a proportionate share of the reservation pie based on the OBC population. The central government’s reluctance is largely political, as data from an all-India caste census would likely lead to pressure by OBC representatives for a larger share of reservations as pressure groups emanate from within this vast social group.
The demand for reservation is a social and political issue and has increased in recent years even in the absence of updated caste-based data. The state and central governments have gone to the extent of giving reservations to various communities on the basis of political convenience, though most of them have been struck down by the higher judiciary. It is precisely to avoid such political bias that reliable estimates should be made available for the numbers of people belonging to different caste groups.
The easiest option would be to use the existing SECC data on caste. This is not only a viable option, but also a desirable one. Since caste does not change over the years, our SECC data is still reliable. Further, given the fact that a population census is not likely to be conducted in the near future, the SECC data can provide these estimates without any delay.
While SECC data can be used by political groups, its real benefit would be the better understanding it would allow of the socio-economic status of different castes. It is not just an academic exercise, but a valuable policy tool to examine the effectiveness of various affirmative actions to reduce caste discrimination and inequality.
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