New Delhi: Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge and MP Rahul Gandhi, who is also Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha, have written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi against the proposed method of collecting caste details in Census 2027.
For the first time since Independence, the Population Census 2027 will include caste counting. In their letter, the Congress leaders have said that the government’s decision to use open-ended questions to record caste details could create confusion.
The exercise has been planned as reliable caste data is essential for framing social justice policies and assessing the socio-economic status of different communities, the leaders said.
“Your government has chosen the method of recording caste information in the census using open-ended questions, which is misleading,” the letter said.
The same caste could have different names, sub-castes and spellings in different parts of India. If people from the same caste are recorded under different names, one caste could end up being counted as several different groups, the Congress leaders said.
“This will result in millions of castes in the country, rendering the entire data obtained from the caste census useless,” it has been stated in the letter.
This could lead to incorrect estimates of the size of different communities, Kharge and Rahul have said. This could also affect decisions on education, jobs, government planning and social justice schemes, they said.
The two also wrote that the proposed census would not give an accurate figure for the total OBC population because the questionnaire does not include the term “backward class”.
They suggested using a fixed list of castes through a drop-down option instead of allowing people to enter caste names freely.
Such a list could be prepared using existing government lists, including the Socially and Educationally Backward Classes list and information from the Anthropological Survey of India, they said.
Citing caste surveys conducted in Telangana and Bihar they said both used caste lists. Copies of the caste lists from the Telangana Caste Survey-2024 and Bihar Caste Survey-2022 were attached to the letter.
“We do not accept this method of conducting a caste census,” Kharge and Rahul wrote, asking the government to cancel the current questionnaire and prepare a new one after consulting political parties, experts and the public, as reported by Hindustan Times.
The new method should ensure that the number of people belonging to each caste and community is recorded correctly, they demanded.
While the census, so far, has separately count Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs), the population of other communities, including Other Backward Classes (OBCs), was not separately counted.