OBC labour: India’s uncounted economic powerhouse

A major section of India’s working population, comprising Other Backward Classes (OBCs) and Most Backward Classes (MBCs), remains largely omitted from national employment statistics, even as the 2027 Census prepares, for the first time in decades, to undertake a comprehensive caste enumeration.

The absence matters not merely as a statistical deficiency, but because the communities missing from the tables are deeply embedded in the sectors that keep India’s economy moving.

Agriculture employs roughly 45 per cent of the country’s workforce, while construction accounts for another 12 per cent, placing more than half of India’s workers in two sectors where OBC and MBC labour is widely represented, according to The News Minute report.

Yet the Periodic Labour Force Survey does not disaggregate these workers by caste, leaving the scale of their employment, wages and occupational vulnerability difficult to establish nationally.

Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes have long been recorded through identifiable caste and tribal categories in official datasets, while OBCs and MBCs have never been counted as a national bloc in independent India, the last full caste enumeration having taken place in 1931, under British rule.

Estimates of the OBC population have ranged from 41 per cent in a 2006 National Sample Survey estimate to 52 per cent in the Mandal Commission’s calculations. State-level surveys have since suggested even larger proportions.

Bihar’s 2023 caste survey put Extremely Backward Classes at 36.01 per cent and OBCs at 27.13 per cent, together accounting for 63 per cent of the population. Telangana’s caste survey, released in 2025, placed its OBC population at 56.33 per cent.

The economic disadvantage also visible, even where caste-specific detail is not. A 2022 study published in PLOS ONE, using National Family Health Survey data, found multidimensional poverty among 24.5 per cent of OBCs, compared with 14.9 per cent among the general category. But the national data cannot show which communities within the OBC category bear the greater burden.

Uttar Pradesh’s Hukum Singh Committee estimated that the state’s OBC population was spread across 79 castes, with some communities larger and more politically influential than others. Bihar’s survey similarly showed the demographic weight of particular groups, with Yadavs alone accounting for 14.26 per cent of the state’s population.

OBC political mobilisation since the 1990s has brought substantial gains in literacy, education and access to white-collar employment among younger generations, but wage and higher-education gaps remain.

Meanwhile, workers from OBC and MBC communities are prominent in informal labour, migration, construction, agriculture and the expanding gig economy, where caste composition is still inadequately documented.

Ambedkar’s idea of graded inequality offers a way of understanding this fragmented visibility: a hierarchy can endure when those on different rungs remain divided from one another.