Caste Census in India: Pros & Cons
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-Akansha
The issue of caste-census has once again come on the agenda with political parties and social organizations pressing their stands.
The issue of caste-census has once again come on the agenda with political parties and social organizations pressing their stands.
In a country living with the reality of caste and striving constantly to offset disadvantages created on the basis of social hierarchy, the central government's decision to hold a caste census does have wide appeal. The enumeration of castes is to be undertaken along with a ‘Below Poverty Line' census in such a way that there is a simultaneous mapping of the economic, caste, and religious backgrounds of the entire population.
A mere caste census may have meant just a headcount of diverse communities, but with the plan to integrate socio-economic data with the caste count, there is a hope that the country might, at last, have a set of quantifiable data that would justify key administrative measures predicated on caste identity.
Over the years, the debate over the use of caste as the basis for ensuring social justice in education and public employment has been resolved in favour of caste-based reservation for ‘socially and educationally backward classes.'
Once caste was accepted as the main parameter on which social justice would be measured, it was only a matter of time before the country came around to the view that a restoration of the pre-independence system of including caste in the decennial Census was necessary. The continuance of existing levels of caste reservation also hinges on a collection of castewise data. For the judicially imposed limit of fifty percent on the quantum of reservation — flowing from a constitutional scheme that says the extent of reservation, being the exception, cannot exceed equal treatment, the norm — can be overcome only by providing hard data to the court.
Census
The origin of the Census in India goes back to the colonial exercise of 1881. Census has evolved and been used by the government, policymakers, academics, and others to capture the Indian population, access resources, map social change, delimitation exercises, etc. However, as early as the 1940s, W.W.M. Yeatts, Census Commissioner for India for the 1941 Census, had pointed out that “the census is a large, immensely powerful, but blunt instrument unsuited for specialized inquiry.”
SECC
The Socio-Economic and Caste Census (SECC) was conducted in 2011 for the first time since 1931. SECC is meant to canvass every Indian family, both in rural and urban India, and ask about their: Economic status, so as to allow Central and State authorities to come up with a range of indicators of deprivation, permutations, and combinations of that could be used by each authority to define a poor or deprived person. It is also meant to ask every person their specific caste name to allow the government to re-evaluate which caste groups were economically worse off and which were better off. SECC has the potential to allow for a mapping of inequalities at a broader level.
Pros
Helpful in Managing Social Equity Programmes: India's social equality programmes cannot be a success without the data and a caste census would help fix that. Due to the lack of data, there is no proper estimate for the population of OBCs, groups within the OBCs and more. The Mandal Commission estimated the OBC population at five percent while some others have pinned the OBC population from 36 to 65%. The census would 'besides resolving the needless mystery about the size of the OBC population, census enumeration would yield a wealth of demographic information (sex ratio, mortality rate, life expectancy), educational data (male and female literacy, ratio of school-going population, number of graduates) and policy relevant information about economic conditions (house-type, assets, occupation) of the OBCs'.
Bring a Measure of Objectivity on Reservation: A caste-based census could go a long way in bringing a measure of objectivity to the debate on reservations. According to the Rohini Commission, which was formed to look into equitable redistribution of the 27% quota for OBCs, noted that there are around 2,633 castes covered under the OBC reservation. However, the Centre’s reservation policy from 1992 doesn’t take into account that there exists within the OBCs, a separate category of Extremely Backward Castes, who are much more marginalized.
Cons
Repercussions of a Caste Census: Caste has an emotive element and thus there exist the political and social repercussions of a caste census. There have been concerns that counting caste may help solidify or harden identities. Due to these repercussions, nearly a decade after the SECC 2011, a sizable amount of its data remains unreleased or released only in parts.
Arguments for demanding a caste census: Political parties batting for the caste census cite the need for caste-wise data to justify the extension of reservations to various communities. On the other hand, there is also a large body of scholarly work, done by sociologists, political scientists and historians, which bypass the welfare argument to assert that India’s fundamental mistake in its battle to overcome caste was not doing a caste census. According to these scholars, formal blindness to caste in a casteist society results in a denial of the web of caste-based privileges that continue to funnel opportunities to those at the top of the caste hierarchy.
They point out that while the very term ‘caste’ has come to be associated with ‘lower castes’, the SCs or the OBCs, the upper castes tend to appear “casteless”. They argue that in order to abolish caste, it is essential to first abolish caste-derived privileges, and in order to do that, the state must first map castes and their socio-economic status privileges/deprivations, which is what a caste census seeks to do. The government has cited numerous administrative, operational, and logistical reasons to argue that collecting caste data during the 2021 census — postponed to next year due to COVID-19 — is unfeasible, and attempting it could endanger the census exercise itself. It begins by pointing to the difference in caste categories according to different lists.
While the Central list contained 2,479 OBC castes, there were 3,150 OBC castes as per the lists of all the States and Union Territories taken together. Unlike in the case of the SCs and the STs, there is no constitutional mandate for the Registrar-General and Census Commissioner, India, to provide the census figures of the OBCs and the BCCs. And lastly, it has cited the 2014 Supreme Court judgment setting aside two orders of the Madras High Court directing the Centre to conduct a caste census. As per this Supreme Court judgment, what information to collect in a census is a policy decision of the government, and while the court may find a certain policy untenable, it was “legally impermissible” for the court to dictate to the government what policy it ought to follow.
Way Forward
A caste census may not sit well with the goal of a casteless society, but it may serve as a means of addressing inequities in society. Caste data will enable independent research not only into the question of who does and does not need affirmative action but also into the effectiveness of this measure. Impartial data and subsequent research might save the bona fide attempts the uplift the most backward classes from the shadow of caste and class politics and be informative to people on both sides of the spectrum – for and against reservation. It is no reservation that creates the current divide in our society but the misuse or the perceived misuse of reservation.