Count, Don’t Just Categorise

Context: Returning states their power to make OBC lists makes sense but can be more fodder for pure politics.

Background

• The Constitution (127th Amendment) Bill, 2021, which was unanimously passed by both Houses, seeks to restore the states' power to make their own OBC lists.
• The bill seeks to reverse a recent SC verdict and give back power to states and UTs to notify their respective lists.

Criticisms against the Bill: Scope for manipulation and furthering caste-politics.

• Consolidating caste identities:

• As the Bill uses caste as an instrument against the inequalities.
• Caste shaping access to services and rights: While state is supposed to be caste-blind, it is populated by individuals who look at the world through the prism of caste and its baggage of social hierarchies
• Data gap: OBC quota is viewed as the only instance of an affirmative action programme in the world in which the beneficiaries are not counted.
• In 2011, GoI conducted Socio-Economic Caste Census, which enumerated castes in rural areas. This data was never released.
• Hypocrisy of political parties: Which micro-target individual castes as part of their electoral strategy but claim to be caste-blind when it comes to enacting social policy.

Way forward: A non-partisan enumeration of castes, either done through the census or conducted by a third Backward Classes Commission, would attenuate the scope of such manipulation and force parties to pay more attention to evidence.