Caste vs. Class: The 2027 Census Dilemma

Context

The Union Government has decided to adopt an open-column system for recording caste data in the 2027 Census. During administrative deliberations, the government rejected the proposal to use the existing Other Backward Classes (OBC) lists maintained by the Central and State governments. The rationale was that these lists classify communities into broad “classes” rather than providing a uniform list of specific castes for caste enumeration.

Reasons for Dropping OBC Lists

The Registrar General of India (RGI) and the Ministry of Home Affairs pointed out that the OBC lists suffer from various structural flaws and are impractical for a detailed caste-based enumeration:

• Inclusion of Non-Caste Groups: The Central and State OBC lists contain nearly 3,000 communities. But a small proportion of these entries is of occupational groups, settler groups or of particular types of labourers and not of a particular caste. “The examples cited are concrete: Officials pointed to “local borns” in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and tea garden workers in Assam.”
• Inter-State Categorisation Anomalies: Caste identities are not uniform across state boundaries. Several communities which may be in OBC lists in one State may be considered ST or SC in others. The absence of national harmonisation results in technical issues when it comes to the harmonisation of a national drop down menu.
• Nature of the Lists: By definition, under Article 342A of the Constitution, these lists denote Socially and Educationally Backward Classes (SEBCs). They are not anthropological counts of endogamous groups of castes but descriptions of socioeconomic backwardness.

The adopted mechanism is the Open-Column Method.

Instead of pre-defined drop-down options used for Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs), the 2027 Census will feature an open field format for all other categories.

• Verbatim Recording: Enumerators will transcribe the name of the caste given by the head of the household without the involvement of any state body to arbitrate or verify the structure of the caste.
• Historical Precedent: It would be the first Census to count caste beyond the Presidential lists of SC/ST since 1931.

Key Administrative and Policy Challenges

While the open-column method avoids state-level arbitration, experts, sociologists, and opposition leaders point out significant vulnerabilities:

• Data Fragmentation (The 2011 Precedent): In the Socio-Economic and Caste Census (SECC) of 2011, an open field methodology led to the creation of over 46 lakh distinct caste names due to regional spellings, synonyms, and sub-caste descriptions. If the surname is misspelled, then the misspelling also is included in the caste column. The government ended up withholding the raw 2011 data after the overwhelming data noise.
• Absence of a Standardised Caste Code: Unlike SC/ST categories that rely on updated Presidential Orders, the lack of mandatory caste coding means the open-column method will produce an unusable narrative dataset. It will not yield a correct, clean and exclusive estimate of the national OBC population, critics say.
• Constraints of capacity: The Census of India is not a verification body but an exercise to gather data. It does not have a special linguistic and sociological coding unit to process millions of phonetic differences into a structured database.

Way Forward

To extract meaningful data for policies like OBC sub-categorisation or expanding social security benefits, India needs a balanced framework:

• Consultative Standardisation: The RGI should consult state government, sociologists, anthropologists for a pre-determined comprehensive list, as recommended by experts.
• Grouping by regionals and by synonyms into one caste code from various regional spellings is possible during the post-enumeration data-processing phase, through the use of advanced phonetic algorithms and data-matching tools.
• Using State Surveys: Methodologies from recent state level surveys like Bihar and Telangana can provide granular baselines for cleaning the macro data which would be collected in the national census. 

Source: The Hindu

UPSC Practice Question 

Q. Discuss the significance of caste enumeration in the 2027 Census.

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