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Does it make sense to divide our country into 4.6 million social units, arrange them hierarchically and call them forward and backward castes? For someone like former Bihar chief minister Lalu Prasad Yadav it makes immense sense. In fact, Lalu and his party workers were out in the streets of Bihar on Monday to make their point. And there is certainly a section in the country which subscribes to Lalu’s views.
Their argument is simple: it will be easier for the government to formulate welfare policies if there is correct estimation of the number of people who are being targeted. Since some benefits—reservation of seats in educational institutions and quota in government jobs- are being given to the people from certain castes, it does make sense to count the number of people who belong to different caste categories. Hence the clamour for publication of census data on castes. Fair enough on the face of it.
But is such exact enumeration possible? Not quite judging by the past experience of counting castes. The data on castes were collected during census operations from 1871 to 1941 (data of the last one never got published). But each census commissioner who had overseen such exercise regretted having done that. For, the data that would come out created more problems than solving them.
Granted that census operations have become much more sophisticated, enumerators better trained and we have better technological tools to process the data. But the problem of caste as a shifting reality without any external marker in most of the cases that defies any pan-India or pan-state definition has remained the same.
Then there are additional complications in the form of inter-caste marriages which are not so infrequent in urban settings now. What will be the caste of children of inter-caste marriages?
What is the probability that census enumerators would have captured the essence of such a complex phenomenon? Quite low. How else can one explain the situation, as per the available data from the latest round of census, where respondents from 330 million households said they belonged to 4.6 million castes?
Enumeration is over and done with. Now the challenge is of assigning backward or forward tag to a caste. Each state has its own list of who belongs to the group of backward classes. The list has not been updated in years. Where and how will the new names be placed? How will the social, educational and economic backwardness of a group be ascertained? There will be claims and counter claims and, if not settled amicably, a series of litigations will follow.
These are logistical problems and they can still be sorted out with some ingenuity. But the more fundamental question is which welfare policies will be better targeted once we have exact count of the beneficiaries? Government jobs? Or admission into elite government institutions?
We know that the role of the state as the leading actor in the employment market has diminished considerably. It is also a fact that state-owned educational institutions, barring a few IITs, IIMs and top notch central universities, are no longer most sought after destinations for students.
Given the way things are, what purpose will the caste census data serve? Very little at a very high social cost in the form of renewed inter-caste tension perhaps. A seemingly divided society will lead to fractured polity which we can ill-afford at this stage of economic transition.
Postscript: I run the risk of getting my ideas dismissed by those who are advocating publication of caste census data because of my surname. But that is a risk worth taking for a healthy debate.
