Here’s All You Need To Know About Bihar’s Caste Census, And Why It Can Boomerang On Its Advocates

The first phase of Bihar’s contentious caste census, which commenced on January 7, will conclude on 21 January.

About 12.7 crore people in 2.5 crore households spread over 38 districts of the state are being enumerated by 3.5 lakh government employees who have undergone five days’ training for the task. 

The census, which is being advocated as the next-gen social justice measure by the state’s ruling mahagathbandhan headed by the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), is being opposed by the BJP. Chief minister Nitish Kumar, who dumped the BJP and joined hands with the RJD last August, has been an ardent advocate of the census. 

The census has generated extreme reactions. The Supreme Court is slated to hear petitions challenging the exercise next Friday (January 20). 

Here’s a panoramic look at the census and its pros and cons:

Objectives of the caste census

• The last caste census was carried out by the British in 1931 and the need for a fresh one is overdue, especially since India has undergone significant demographic changes since then;

• Reservations and other affirmative action initiatives have to be based on proper enumeration of intended beneficiaries and in the absence of precise caste data, it is impossible to frame policies intended to benefit the socially deprived and marginalised castes;

• A scientific counting of caste groups will help government restructure affirmative action programmes to target the caste groups that are still socially and economically backward;

• The caste census will wield a wealth of information on sex ratio, mortality rates, life expectancy, male and female literacy, educational status and economic status of various castes;

• Such information is crucial in more effective delivery of targeted welfare programmes;

• The census will bring objectivity to the debate on reservations;

• The unstated political objective of the exercise is to counter the BJP’s growing influence among OBCs.

Arguments against the census:

• A caste census militates against the country’s social goal of evolving into a casteless society;

• The census will solidify caste identities, accentuate casteism and caste divisions;

• It can have grave social and political repercussions;

• It will trigger caste politics and social conflict, and will set the clock back on nation-building;

• Caste census smacks of the colonial practice of ‘divide and rule’;

• There is no constitutional mandate for caste-based census and only the Union Government is empowered to conduct a census;

• The whole exercise can be rigged;

• Caste census will be flawed since many people use their clan/gotra, caste and sub-caste names interchangeably;

• Basing affirmative action interventions on caste census will not be a good policy tool since many disguise their castes;

• Since a complete and correct data compilation and collation is impossible, the data from the census will be unusable for official purposes;

• Enumerators have little training and are not investigators or verifiers who can detect wrong and misleading information provided to them and correct such information--this will endanger the whole exercise;

• The census will open the floodgates to demands for more reservations that have continued for 75 years against the stated period of ten years; 

• Demands for more reservations that political parties will have to concede will sound the death-knell for meritocracy, adversely affect governance and delivery of services and drive away human capital;

• A similar exercise--the Socio-Economic & Caste Census (SECC)--carried out by the UPA Government across the country in 2011 failed and the data had to be junked;

• Caste is context-specific: even well-educated and affluent Dalits face discrimination is specific fields and, thus, even the most targeted affirmative action cannot completely address such problems;

• There are too many castes and subcastes in every state and Union Territory and caste identities are often fluid;

• Also, members of a particular caste may be socially and economically marginalised in one state, but may be in a much better position in another state or even in another region within the same state;

The SECC 2011 and why it failed:

• The socio-economic and caste census in 2011 was carried out by two entities: the Department of Rural Development in rural areas and Ministry of Housing & Urban Poverty Alleviation in urban areas;

• It was a paperless census conducted in 640 districts of the country;

• But no registry of castes was prepared before the census and this resulted in glaring errors by enumerators who spelt the name of the same caste in dozens of different ways;

• The SECC 2011 revealed the number of castes in India was an astonishing 46 lakh; the 1931 census put the number of castes in India at 4147;

• The UPA Government realised the grave flaws in the misleading and erroneous data that the SECC 2011 threw up and made the data unusable for official purposes; the data was rightly junked and the government of the day even refused to make the raw data public. 

How the census can backfire on its advocates:

• The census is likely to reveal that the dominant caste groups in Bihar like the Yadavs and the Kurmis (chief minister Nitish Kumar is a Kurmi) have cornered all benefits accruing from reservation and social welfare measures targeted at OBCs;

• These dominant caste groups will then have to forego many of the benefits they have cornered or dilute their share of power and benefits to accommodate the caste groups who remain poor and socially marginalised;

• Apart from the Yadavs and Kurmis, the Vaishyas and Kushwahas have been the primary beneficiaries of the state’s Mandal politics and have cornered a lion’s share of social and economic benefits accruing from reservations, besides gaining the most from various welfare projects aimed at OBCs;

• These four caste groups will have to give up their monopoly over reservations and power to accommodate the OBCs who remain poor and backward, and this will cause a lot of heartburn among the dominant OBC groups. 

• Ultimately, that will be counter-productive for the ruling Yadavs (the Lalu Yadav clan) and Nitish Kumar. 

The way forward: 

• There can be no disputing the fact that the benefits of affirmative action and projects and schemes targeted at the socially and economically underprivileged have not percolated to all sections of the OBCs and many groups within the OBC family still remain very poor and marginalised;

• But it does not need a caste census to identify them in order to devise sharper interventions to benefit them. The same objective can be met, without controversy and in a socially harmonious manner, through a scientifically-devised and extensive socio-economic survey carried out by well-trained enumerators. 

• The way out is to devise affirmative action to reduce the rich-poor gap, address rising income disparity and extend reservations only to the most socially and economically backward. 

• The last, but vital, step is to accelerate social reform in order to obliterate casteism. This is being carried out vigorously under Prime Minister Modi through various measures like giving more political power to the most backward among SCs, STs and OBCs, devising specific interventions aimed at such groups and good, transparent and honest governance.