New Delhi, 25 August (H.S.): The Congress has demanded immediate changes to the existing format proposed for the upcoming caste census. Congress president and Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Mallikarjun Kharge and Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi have jointly written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, describing the proposed “open-ended” questions for recording caste identities as potentially misleading. They called for the introduction of a “drop-down list” to ensure an accurate and authentic enumeration of castes and sought extensive consultations with all political parties and experts before a new questionnaire is prepared.

In their joint letter to the Prime Minister, Mallikarjun Kharge and Rahul Gandhi said reliable data on the actual population of different castes and their socio-economic conditions was essential for effectively implementing social justice policies. They cautioned that if caste enumeration was not conducted in a scientific and systematic manner, the resulting data could be unreliable, directly affecting policies related to social justice.

The two leaders said that if the caste name provided by each individual during the census were recorded exactly as stated, multiple names for the same caste could emerge. Since different local names for castes and sub-castes are prevalent across various states and regions of India, they argued that the proposed system could fragment caste-related data. This, they said, could weaken the overall dataset for policy-making purposes.

As an alternative to the existing “open-ended” system, Kharge and Rahul Gandhi suggested preparing a “drop-down list” for other castes along the lines of the system used for enumerating Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. They said such a list could be prepared on the basis of existing government lists relating to socially and educationally backward classes, as well as information available through the Anthropological Survey of India.

The two Congress leaders also enclosed copies of the coded caste lists used in the Telangana Caste Survey-2024 and the Bihar Caste Survey-2022 along with their letter. They noted that these states had used a drop-down format to identify and classify castes, suggesting that a similar system could also be adopted at the national level.

The opposition leaders urged the Prime Minister to scrap the existing questionnaire and involve all political parties in the process of preparing a new one. They also called for extensive consultations with sociologists, demographers and other relevant experts to ensure that the caste enumeration process is comprehensive, scientifically robust and suitable for policy formulation.

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Hindusthan Samachar / Jun Sarkar