The opposition has been demanding caste census for a long time.
Now NDA ally JDU has also joined the opposition. JDU has also said that caste based census should be included for discussion in the parliamentary committee.
Since independence, the Indian government has never conducted a caste census. Although the UPA government did collect caste data during the census, it has not been made public till date.
Why did the government conduct Socio-Economic Caste Census (SECC)?
During UPA 2, when the government wanted to expand its schemes for the poor, it decided to conduct Socio Economic Caste Census in both urban and rural areas to find out the level of poverty.
Some rules were fixed under which some categories were to be automatically included in the list of poor. If a family had a car or a concrete house with three rooms, then it was directly removed from the poverty line.
At the same time, single mothers and manual scavengers were to be placed in the list below the poverty line. Its main purpose was to determine the socio-economic status of families. At the same time, their caste was also to be determined on the basis of economic and social status.
How did the Central Government include caste in the 2011 census?
In the meeting of 27 May 2010, the Congress high command decided that along with the 2011 census, data should also be collected on the basis of caste.
This will bring out factual information at the social and political level. However, in this census, only counting was to be done.
There was no consensus on providing information about someone’s social and economic status on the basis of caste. After this, the then Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh assigned this task to some ministers led by the then Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee.
This decision was taken when the census work had already begun. The government had allocated Rs 2200 crore for the 2011 census.
The group led by NC Saxena proposed that some categories should be automatically included in BPL and some should be excluded.
This was to be decided on the basis of land, vehicle, farming equipment and income tax. At the same time, a proposal was made to automatically include tribals, Mahadalits, single women, disabled and homeless people in the BPL category.
Apart from this, other people were to be assessed on the basis of caste, community, religion, work, education and age of the head of the household.
Critics said that this proposal of NC Saxena will not be effective in identifying the real poor. This will not be able to identify the poor among SC and ST.
On the other hand, washermen, potters, barbers, sweepers, cleaners, weavers will get only two points in this census. In such a situation, it was decided that SC and ST will be counted separately.
The 2011 census was the responsibility of the Rural Development Ministry. Whereas the census of urban areas was handed over to the Urban Development Ministry.
The work of caste census was entrusted to the Ministry of Home Affairs, Registrar General of India and Census Commissioner. The data of Socio Economic Caste Census was to be released by the ministries.
However, the release of the caste census data was banned. According to some officials, people had different methods of declaring their caste.
Some people used to mention sub-caste while some people used to mention caste on the basis of community. After this, in 2022, the Ministry of Social Justice told the Parliament that at present there is no proposal to release caste based data.
At the same time, the NDA government formed a committee under the chairmanship of Arvind Panagariya to separate caste data from the census. However, this data could not be released till now.
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