Maharashtra may go for caste census too
MUMBAI: Cutting across the political divide, the Maharashtra assembly on Friday unanimously demanded a caste-based census to calculate the exact population of Other Backward Classes (OBC) in the state to ensure a fair allotment of quotas in government jobs and educational institutions for the underprivileged communities. Maharashtra becomes the third state, after Odisha and Bihar, to back a caste-based census.
Senior ministers of the ruling Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi (MVA) coalition, joined by the speaker of the assembly, said a caste-based census should be conducted by the state government if the Centre wasn’t willing to accept the demand for the same.
Deputy chief minister Ajit Pawar said a delegation led by chief minister Uddhav Thackeray would meet Prime Minister
Narendra Modi and Union home minister Amit Shah to press the state’s case for a caste-based census when the 2021 population census is undertaken .
The Bihar assembly on Thursday passed a resolution demanding a caste-based census. And in January, Odisha’s Biju Janata Dal (BJD) government decided to conduct its own caste-based census to along with the national population enumeration exercise. On Friday, opposition party leaders in Uttar Pradesh also called for a caste-based enumeration in India’s most populous state.
The issue of was raised during zero hour in the Maharashtra assembly on Friday in the backdrop of the Centre rejecting the state’s demand for such a census. The state legislature had passed a resolution unanimously, on January 8, demanding a caste-based census to arrive at an estimate of the population of OBCS.
The Registrar General and
Census Commissioner of India informed the state legislature that a caste-based enumeration was not possible.
“As per the central list the total number of OBCS in the country is 6,285, while the numbers go up to 7,200 if the lists prepared by states and union territories are taken into account. Since people use their clan, gotra, sub-castes and caste names interchangeably and due to the phonetic similarities in the names, it may lead to the misclassification of the castes. As such, it will be difficult to meaningfully tabulate and classify caste returns. Social and political movements and change in the names of traditional castes will lead to problems. Similarly, the organised surreptitious means adopted by some during the counting of OBCS and SEBCS cannot be ruled out. This would seriously influence the census results and may put the census process in jeopardy,” the Registrar General wrote in a letter received by the assembly. SEBC is short for Socially and Educationally Backward Classes.
The first caste census in India was conducted in 1931, which became the basis for implementing 27% reservation for OBCS in admissions in higher education institutions and in government jobs. According to the Census website, the rationale for not conducting a caste census was cited by India’s first home minister Vallabbhai Patel in a speech in Parliament in 1950. He said, “The decision to discourage community distinction based on the Caste was in keeping with the spirit of the secular State enshrined in the Preamble of the Constitution of India.”
A decision to conduct a caste census in 2011 was taken by a group of ministers headed by then finance minister Pranab Mukherjee following demands made inside and outside Parliament.
The socio-economic caste census (SECC) was conducted in July 2011. While the socio-economic data was released in 2015, the government constituted an expert committee under then vice-chairperson of NITI Aayog, Arvind Panagariya, to classify the castes. The committee met a few times but did not submit its report.
Food and civil supplies minister and Nationalist Congress Party leader Chhagan Bhujbal said the Rajnath Singh, former Union home minister who now leads the defence ministry, and Mukherjee had backed such census.