Hyderabad, April 16 --  Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST) in Telangana are three times more backward than general caste communities, Backward Classes (BC) are 2.7 times more backward, and 30 per cent of the state's welfare beneficiaries come from communities that are less deprived than the state average. These are among the headline findings of the Telangana Socio, Economic, Educational, Employment, Political and Caste (SEEEPC) Survey 2024 released on Wednesday, April 15.

The survey, referred to as the caste census, covered 3.55 crore people across 242 castes and, as the expert panel calls it, is as empirically equivalent to a census, having reached 97 per cent of the state's population through a door-to-door enumerati...