Explained: What Is The Caste Census & Why It Is Demanded By Political Parties Now?

In the midst of debates around a delayed and digital census, due to the pandemic, there is also a renewed demand for caste census, which is said to be the need of the hour by its supporters but on the other hand not getting a favourable response by the government at the Centre.

What is the caste census?

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Caste census means inclusion of caste-wise tabulation of India¡¯s population in the Census exercise, which is a decennial count of the Indian population. From 1951 to 2011, every census in India has published the population of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, comprising the Dalits and the Adivasis, along with the gamut of data including religions, languages, socio-economic status, etc.

It, however, has never counted OBC¡¯s, the lower and intermediate castes, which according to the Mandal commission make up around 52 per cent of the country¡¯s population. All castes other than Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes are counted under the general category.

This is where the demand for caste census comes from.

Has there ever been a caste census?

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Not properly since independence. The first census in India began in 1872 and the periodic count in 1881 under British rule. Since then, the data on caste was always included, though only till 1931.

The caste count was excluded for the 1941 census reportedly because of administrative and financial issues with England involved in World War II.

Thus the count of OBCs is, therefore, available for 1931, when their share of the population was found to be about 52 percent.

However, faced with a similar clamour for a caste census in 2010, the then Congress-led UPA government had partially conceded to the demand as the caste enumeration was not done as part of Census 2011, but a separate Socio-Economic Caste Census (SECC) was conducted in the same year, which also gleaned data on caste.

Later, the raw caste data was handed over to the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, however, it was never made public by the BJP government.

So why is it demanded now?

The demand to include caste in the census is long-pending. It arises from the fact that there is no documented data on OBC population in India.

The issue was picked up by Bihar's current and former chief ministers Nitish Kumar and Jitan Ram Manjhi on separate occasions. After that it was followed by BJP national secretary Pankaja Munde (in a tweet on January 24) and the Maharashtra Assembly, which passed a resolution on January 8 urging the Centre to hold a caste-based Census in 2021.

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Later, even the constitutional body National Commission for Backward Classes urged the government to collect data on the population of OBCs and now various parties of different states have voiced their support of caste census.

Although the demand usually comes up every time in the run up to the census exercise. The argument for the demand is that since the census already documents huge amounts of data including religions, languages, socio-economic status and Dalits, Adivasis and different tribes, then why not count OBCs too?

Further, the 1931 caste census included present-day Pakistan and Bangladesh. India¡¯s population has since increased three-fold to 1.21 billion in 2011.

Experts believe the economic status of the dominant OBC castes have improved in the past 80 years and certain castes have not benefited as much.

So, the new caste census is required to measure the economic and social well-being of all castes.

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Amid growing political pressure, the then Union home minister Rajnath Singh in August 2018 announced that in census 2021, data of OBCs will also be collected.

However, in an affidavit filed before the Supreme Court on 21 September, the Union Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment had said that it is not feasible to collect information on Backward Class of Citizens (BCC) in the forthcoming census, hence, ruling out the possibility of a caste-based census as of now.

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