New Delhi, Aug. 25 -- Leaders of Opposition Mallikarjun Kharge and Rahul Gandhi have written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi over the caste census issue, demanding that the government scrap the existing questionnaire for it and formulate a new one after consulting political parties, experts, and the general public.
Kharge and Gandhi said they do not accept the caste census being conducted in the current manner and urged the government to take cue from the caste surveys done in Telangana and Bihar.
Briefing reporters on the letter written in Hindi by Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Kharge and Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha Gandhi on August 20, Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh said the government's current efforts towards a caste census are just a "whitewash".
Ramesh noted that this is the third letter written by the Congress leadership to Modi over the issue but have not received any reply.
Ramesh highlighted critical flaws in the current 40-question format. The caste questionnaire uses open-ended questions rather than pre-defined drop-down menus, making enumeration inconsistent and rendering data unreliable. Critically, the questionnaire omits reference to "Backward Class," making it impossible to accurately gauge the OBC population.
In their letter, Kharge and Gandhi said social justice policies in India cannot be effectively implemented without accurate data and a precise assessment of the numerical strength and socio-economic status of various castes is possible only if the caste enumeration is conducted correctly.
"Your government has opted for an open-ended question format to record caste details in the census, which is misleading. Under this method, whatever name an individual provides for their caste will be recorded as it is," the leaders said in their letter to Modi.
In India, the same caste is known by different names, sub-castes, and linguistic variations across different regions, Congress president Kharge and former party chief Rahul Gandhi pointed out.
Consequently, if members of the same caste are recorded under different names during the census, a single caste could end up being fragmented into thousands of distinct names, they argued.
This would result in a list of hundreds of thousands of caste names, rendering the entire dataset obtained from the caste census useless, Kharge and Gandhi argued.
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from Millennium Post.