No Excuses Please, India Awaits A Full Caste Headcount

Context: Government’s logistical or legal justifications to not disclose caste census data do not stand scrutiny.

Challenges in conducting caste census

• Impracticability of full caste enumeration:
  • A complex exercise: Population census in a vast and uniquely diverse country such as India is a complex exercise due to complicated categories such as language, religion and caste.
  • Huge number of caste names: Total number of castes counted in 1931 Census was 4,147 but the SECC of 2011 returned over 46 lakh caste names.
• Overwhelming operational difficulties:
  • Difficulties due to flaws in the manner of conducting census and mistakes by enumerators like confusion over the spellings and classification of castes.
  • High scope for errors in caste enumeration: Data errors on caste and religion in SECC 2011 accounted 1.34 crore out of 118.64 crore people, around 1% of total enumerated population.
  • Policy neglect: NITI Aayog Expert Committee for classification of caste names returned in SECC 2011 was appointed by Central Government but no other member was appointed to the committee except Vice Chairman of NITI Aayog and no progress have been made in 6 years.
• Wastage of Resources: Since 99% of the castes enumerated in SECC 2011 had a population of fewer than 100 persons, profiling caste of all population is going to increase cost of Census many times.
• Absence of constitutional or statutory framework to count castes other than SCs and STs.
• Risk of compromising basic integrity of census exercise, distorting the fundamentals of population count exercise.

Way forward: Caste census is complex, yet feasible exercise

• Create an all-India Registry of Castes by combining central lists of SCs and STs and State lists of OBCs.
• Use of Big Data technology to process complex caste data.
• Rationalisation and classification of raw caste into a maximum of 500 castes at State level or around 5,000 castes at all-India level.
• Improvement in training manuals for enumerators based on a single, consolidated caste list for each State.
• Rectifying the administrative failings through proper functioning of NITI Aayog Expert Committee for classification of caste.