If India is to carry on with caste-based reservations, the argument goes, what’s wrong with the argument for having a caste-based census as demanded by Lalu Prasad and Mulayam Singh Yadav? The current method of figuring out the country’s caste composition is based on a five-yearly sample by the National Sample Survey (NSS), and the numbers have varied quite a lot between the last two surveys. Many argue the new numbers are an overstatement — a census, by this logic, will separate the wheat from the chaff, and you’ll know just how many people there are in various caste groups. That may well be the case, those opposed to caste-census like Home Minister P Chidambaram argue that there are huge difficulties associated with a caste-census. For one, there are supposed to be around 18,000-odd caste groups. This means there can clearly be no check boxes for caste groups; if the option is to have a “what is your caste?” question to be answered by the respondent being canvassed, how do you possibly aggregate this question from over a billion people if there are at least 18,000 possible answers to the question? There is also the question of who is backward and who isn’t — one caste group may be backward in one state and a forward in another. Indeed, this is probably the reason why the proportion of other backward castes (OBCs) rose between the last two NSS rounds — in the five-year period in between the first one in 1999-00 and the second in 2004-05, state governments probably added more castes to the list of backwards. So, if states are free to keep increasing the list, how will a census help since the number will always be fluid?
There are other operational problems that the home minister has enumerated, but the real question to be asked is how the census, even if it can be done, will really help? It is probably not anyone’s case that the proportion of SC/STs has fallen, but even if you assume it has, can anyone really think SC/ST groups will allow the government to take back the 22.5 per cent reservations that have been mandated for them? So, maybe the census will give us an accurate number for OBCs. Assume that it tells you, purely hypothetically, there are only 18 per cent OBCs as opposed to the NSS number of around 40 per cent, surely the OBCs will not stand a reduction in the seats reserved for them. And even if the number is, for the sake of argument, 60 per cent, there is nothing that can be done to raise the reservation percentage since the courts have put a clear ceiling to total reservation. In other words, given the problems associated with a caste-based census and the extremely limited benefits to be got from it, it’s best to junk the idea.