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Caste Census debate: Data gaps, political risks, and social equity
A matter of confidentiality, reporting bias, and political ramifications
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Amitabh Kundu
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The demand for a caste Census in India primarily stems from the iniquitous access to resources and inadequate political representation of the marginalised and vulnerable population. As affirmative action policies evolved, the necessity of generating robust empirical data to assess the inequitable distribution of socio-political and economic benefits among individuals and caste groups has come to the forefront.
The Socio-Economic and Caste Census (SECC) conducted in 2011 was an attempt to collect such data, aiming to identify the poor and determine household-level eligibility for various welfare programmes. However, while the socio-economic data from the SECC was released, the caste data
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