Census and Caste

What is Census?

A census is the procedure of systematically acquiring and recording information about the members of a given population.It is a regularly occurring and official count of a particular population. 

It is a regularly occurring and official count of a particular population. The Indian census is a decennial exercise started by the British colonial power in 1872.  Since then, a population census has been carried out every 10 years. The latest census commenced on 1 April, 2010. 

The census is conducted in two phases: first, house listing and house numbering phase and second, the actual population enumeration phase.

The census is carried out by the canvassing method. In this method, each and every household is visited and the information is collected by specially trained enumerator.

Should the Census of India 2011 be tasked with the collection of caste data?

This step would make us returning in a sense to the practice of the pre-Independence, colonial era when first cast based census was done in 1931. Opponents of caste enumeration tend to hark back to the ideals of the freedom struggle and the Constitution, which treat caste as illegitimate and see Census enumeration of caste as a tool of ‘divide and rule.'Caste based census will bring  the disintegration and disunity among the Hindus by promoting census on the basis of castes. It was also opposed in the 2001 Census with clear commitment to eliminate inequality of status and invidious treatment. 

The need of the Hour

Independent India has been reluctant to collect such data, except in the case of  people in ‘Scheduled Caste’ (popularly known as Dalits) and ‘Scheduled Tribe’ (popularly known as Adiwasis) categories. Census 2011, if it does include caste, is likely to show a race to the bottom, with at least 20 percent of the Hindu population declaring themselves as Other Backward Castes (OBCs) when they actually belong to an upper caste. An argument in favour of caste enumeration is that if the complexity of castes, which have a significant bearing on society and the polity, is to be understood, authentic data on castes should be available. 

The need to enumerate castes was emphasised by representatives of various Backward Classes Commissions. Their argument primarily centred on the problems of identification of B.Cs and providing reservation for them. 

The first National Commission on Backward Classes (appointed in 1953) and also the various State Commissions have recorded the difficulty they faced in implementing reservation for want of caste-related Census data. The Constitution, while providing for reservation in professional institutions and State services for the Scheduled Castes (S.Cs) and  the Scheduled Tribes (S.Ts), which are known to be historically disadvantaged, has provisions  in Article 15(4) (reservation in professional courses) and Article 16 (4) (reservation of jobs in state services) for reservation "for the advancement of socially and educationally backward classes of citizens, known as Other Backward Classes (OBCs), in proportion to their population". (However, the C in the OBC began to be referred to as denoting ''castes'' instead of "classes", which denotes a collection of individuals satisfying specified criteria.)

While Census enumerators continue to collect caste data of all castes and tribes listed in the Schedules to Articles 341 and 342, they do not collect data on OBCs. Hence, for want of data, the Backward Classes Commissions resort to indirect methods to arrive at a head count of the OBCs, whose classification the judiciary most often invalidates. 

 First Backward Classes Commission Kaka Kalelkar Commission (1953) failed to justify the accurate numbers and its recommendations were rejected. Then Second Backward Classes Commission MANDAL Commission (1980) came out with 52% OBCs comprising Indian population. And it was also failed to be implemented. The National Commission for Backward Classes Act, 1993, was enacted to revise the B.Cs list periodically for "the deletion of castes that have ceased to be backward classes or for inclusion in such lists new backward classes". Again, this cannot be done without caste data.

 In 1999-2000, the large-scale NSS survey found out that approximately 36 percent of the population was OBC (this includes about 4 per cent Muslim OBCs).  When the same survey was repeated five years later in 2004-05, the share of the OBC population had shot up to 41 per cent. This increase means OBCs would have had to be breeding faster than rabbits in the last five years to get such a massive hike in population share.. The simple incentive math is behind the increase. About 50 million people raced to the bottom in classifying themselves as OBCs when they most likely were not. 

In the absence of authentic caste data, either the figures  are extrapolated with some modifications or estimates by caste groups themselves are relied upon. Either of these can be misleading. For instance, the population of Andhra P radesh, according to the 1991 Census, was 6.65 crores and the Central Statistical Organisation's (CSO) estimation for 2001 is 7.69 crores. Almost all castes barring Kammas, Jains, Anglo-Indians and Buddhists have claimed B.C. status, arguing that they ar e the most backward on social, educational and economic grounds and that they are under-represented in government services and in political institutions. These castes have come out with estimations of their own numbers; the trouble is that only that they add up to 25 crores, or four times the State's actual population.

Thus there is a need for knowledge of the local caste systems. There is the need for a decentralised, multi-disciplinary approach to caste enumeration involving all the stakeholders in the process. Thus the Census, which is centralised on several counts, is not the appropriate agency to enumerate something as complex as castes.