Caste based Census is a laborious task: Centre to SC on its exclusion
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New Delhi: As against the call to conduct a caste Census of Backward Classes, the Centre held it a laborious task that incurs no small administrative difficulties and termed the exclusion of the same as a conscious policy decision.
The Centre said this in an affidavit filed in the Supreme Court as a response to the Maharashtra government which demanded that the Centre share the SECC 201 raw caste data of Other Backward Classes with the state, in the context of the Centre's failure in providing the same despite repeated demands.
The Centre's affidavit termed the caste enumeration in Socio-Economic and Caste Census as "fraught" with mistakes and inaccuracies.
In January, the Centre in another affidavit had informed the Supreme Court of the series of data to be collected during Census 2021, details relating to Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes will also be included in it but not the details on other castes.
Referring to the earlier affidavit, the secretary of the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment said to the court that the decision to exclude the other castes from the Census purview was not taken without adequate deliberation.
Justifying its decision to avoid the enumeration OBCs/BCCs (Backward Class of Citizens), the affidavit claimed that the data collection is nothing short of an administratively difficult task which had ended up generating inaccurate and insufficient data when done in the pre-independence period.
"The issue has been examined at length in the past at different points of time. Each time, the view has consistently been that the caste Census of Backward Classes is administratively difficult and cumbersome; it has suffered and will suffer both on account of completeness and accuracy of the data, as also evident from the infirmities of the SCEE, 2011 data mentioned in above making it unusable for any official purposes and cannot be mentioned as a source of information for population data in any official document," the affidavit said.
The Centre's stand assumes significance as recently, a 10-party delegation from Bihar, which was led by Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, whose JD(U) is an ally of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA), had met Prime Minister Narendra Modi demanding caste Census.