Kharge, Rahul urge PM to amend caste format in census form

Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge and Lok Sabha’s Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday asked Prime Minister Narendra Modi to amend the open-ended format the ongoing census is using to collect caste data, something that means that the government could end up with hundreds of thousands of caste names. With no pre-approved list (as was used in completed caste counts in Bihar and Telangana), this means that census officials have a Herculean task in analysing the data. There are also fears that this could mean the data never sees light of data -- much like the 2011 exercise to count castes that failed for the same reason.

In effect, the argument goes, the caste census, a demand articulated by several parties, including some of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s allies could end up being an exercise in futility.

The ultimate objective of these demands was to expand the reservation pie further, proportionately with a segment’s share in the population.

In their letter to the PM, the two Congress leaders suggested that the government call an all-party meeting, consult experts and add a drop-down box specifically for OBCs (other backward classes) based on the model used by Telangana in its 2024 caste survey. In a briefing, Congress’ communications chief Jairam Ramesh also accused the government of not doing a proper caste enumeration and dubbed the current process as “deception”.

Terming the current census unreliable, Gandhi and Kharge wrote “If the accurate count of a community is not recorded, any assessment of its status will also be flawed. This will disadvantage backward, extremely backward, and other deprived communities, and will also impact decisions related to education, employment, government schemes, and social justice. Most importantly, it will remain impossible to determine the size of the OBC population in India, as the term “backward class” has not even been included in this census.”

“In India, a single caste is known by different names, sub-castes, and languages across various regions. Consequently, if members of the same caste are recorded under different names during the census, that single caste would end up fragmented into thousands of different names. This would result in the emergence of hundreds of thousands of caste names, rendering the entire dataset obtained from the caste census useless,” they added. They attached the Telangana model questionnaire with their report.

Ramesh pointed out that the government had said in an affidavit to the Supreme Court in 2021 that a drop-down menu is preferable. “It is found that in several hundred cases, the caste column mentions about number of symbols against caste names. There is no registry of caste prepared prior to the conduct of 2011 Census. It would have been ideal for the Registry of Castes that there should have been given a drop down menu for selection of castes..” the affidavit, reviewed by HT, said.

Ramesh said that a faulty census can severely impact the social justice goals and reservation. “Rahul ji and Kharge ji urged the Prime Minister to adopt the same methodology used in Bihar and Telangana for the upcoming national-level census—which has just commenced. There is still time for the Prime Minister to make corrections, as the caste census has currently only begun in Ladakh, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu & Kashmir, and parts of Uttarakhand; the nationwide exercise is scheduled for February 2027. There is still time to make improvements over the next few months. A constructive suggestion has been put forward by Rahul ji and Kharge ji, and we hope the Prime Minister will not ignore this letter. Our demand is that the 2027 national census be conducted using the same methodology employed in Bihar and Telangana.”