New Delhi: The Congress Tuesday said a caste census that merely records caste identities would hold little value, stressing that the exercise should aim to assess people’s living standards and the impact of government welfare schemes on their lives.
The party’s articulation of this position comes at a time when its Karnataka unit is under pressure from the politically dominant Vokkaliga and Lingayat communities, who are upset over being “undercounted” in a survey commissioned by Chief Minister Siddaramaiah in 2015.
Though the Socio-Economic and Education Survey was carried out in the previous term of Siddaramaiah as the CM, its findings were never officially released. However, earlier this year, certain portions of the report were leaked, triggering protests by Vokkaligas and Lingayats.
A cornered Congress has attempted to wriggle out of the situation by ordering a re-enumeration of castes in Karnataka within the next three months. And, that is why its latest underlining that a caste census must go beyond enumeration of caste identities is significant.
“The objective of the exercise is not just to get the name and the caste of a person, that I don’t think has that much value. The real value is that you understand in what condition they are living, how successful the schemes have been so far, are the targeted budgets and policy programmes reaching the ones that we are intending for,” Congress general secretary Sachin Pilot said at a press conference at the party’s new headquarters in Delhi’s Kotla Marg.
The former Rajasthan deputy chief minister said Rahul Gandhi’s pitch for a nation-wide caste census was always about carrying out an “x-ray” of the country, rather than simply counting castes.
“When we said, we wanted a caste census, the objective was to know exactly in what conditions people of India are living, those who are being deprived, who are not in the mainstream, how much have they got education, how much access they have to government schemes and policy programs, in what economic condition are they living, what is an expanding, household incomes, all that is required for us to do better policy combination,” he said..
The idea, he added, is not just to collect data of an individual’s caste or a household’s caste.
“The objective is to know exactly in what condition these families are living and how we can better curate our policies to substantially help the livelihood of those people. Unless we have tangible data, no state government and no central government can actually do targeted interventions and that is what we wanted to do.”
On 30 April, the Centre had announced that caste enumeration would be included in the next population census. And on Monday, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) issued a notification saying that the next census will be held in 2027.
While the Congress has questioned the absence of the term census in the notification, the Centre has dismissed the contention, pointing out that the MHA has already announced in multiple press statements that caste will be counted as part of the next exercise.
Pilot highlighted the issue even on Tuesday, adding that the allocation of Rs 570 crore for conducting census in the annual budget also raises questions on the Centre’s intentions.
“Given the BJP government’s track record of backtracking, use of distraction tactics in times of its failures and its affinity to hypocrisy, we won’t be surprised if it quietly shelves the caste census once again. Also, while the census would cost about Rs 8,000 to Rs 10,000 crore, the government had allocated a meagre Rs 570 crore for the purpose, which clearly shows its intentions,” he alleged.
(Edited by Tony Rai)
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