New Delhi, Aug. 26 -- Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge and Lok Sabha's Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday asked the Prime Minister Narendra Modi to amend the open-ended format for census as a single caste would end up fragmented into thousands of different names and render the dataset obtained from the caste census useless. The Congress suggested that the government call an all-party meeting, consult experts and add a drop-down box specifically for OBCs based on the model used by Telangana in its 2024 caste survey. Congress' communications chief Jairam Ramesh also accused the government of not doing a proper caste enumeration and dubbed the current process as "deception". Calling the current census as not reliable, 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." The Congress 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," the affidavit said....