Amidst demands by various political parties for caste-based census ahead of the 2022 assembly polls in several states including Uttar Pradesh, the government is exploring ways of how it can extend benefits of reservation to those OBCs that have been left out of the central list. If completed before the assembly elections in states next year, the BJP could stand to gain as its OBC vote share has grown. Party observers said the OBC vote percentage has gone up in the last elections and further sub categorisation could ensure that the benefits of the government schemes reach them.
The ministry of rural development is holding consultations with the office of Registrar General of India to examine the options of conducting a caste based census in the country.
There are at least three options before the government. Firstly, the decadal Census exercise is expected to be held in April 2022.
There are demands that a question on caste be included in the Census exercise.
But government officials said there are inherent problems in this proposition since the Census is constitutionally bound and mandated to collect information only on Scheduled castes and Scheduled Tribes and not for other backward classes.
“The caste-based census cannot be clubbed with Census 2021 as a data may not be comparable if the question about caste is added over here,” said a government official.
Moreover, there are fears of diluting the authenticity of the census figures. So far, the decadal census exercise has not come under cloud and the data is used as the bedrock for government schemes and many other development initiatives.
Moreover, officials involved in the Census data collection exercise believe that the delayed Census 2021 can only be held in April next year, depending on the COVID-19 pandemic situation and the process will be time consuming, the results of which would not come in till 2023.
However, there is a lot of pressure on the government for conducting a caste-based Census at the earliest, the last being held in 1931, which means that the percentage of OBCs in the country is not known today.
At the moment, there is 27 per cent reservation for the OBCs while the ceiling is 50 per cent. If a caste-based census is held, the government can extend benefits to OBCs in a more targeted manner.
Since clubbing the caste-based census with the decadal census exercise may not be a viable option, the second option is to use the national population register data, which is likely to be updated alongside the Census. Here again the problem lies in the fact that the updation of the NPR has come under controversy with several states like West Bengal, Kerala, Punjab and other opposition ruled states, opposing it.
The third option for the government is to update the socio economic caste census 2012. The SECC had been conducted by the UPA government but the actual caste data was never made public. Instead, the Modi government had set up the Justice G. Rohini commission to look into the sub-categorisation of OBCs for extending benefits for jobs and education. The updation of the SECC separately is being seen as a viable option since it had already analysed the deprivation quotient and used the NPR database for both urban and rural development parameters to dole out to schemes like ujjawala and Pradhan Mantri awas Yojana.
The government may also stand to benefit in the long run as political parties across states may be keen to update the SECC which can then open doors for the updation of the NPR.
