Caste count : Census must be conducted with clarity, transparency
The Tribune Editorial: Asking enumerators to classify people could turn a Census into an exercise in official certification of caste identity.
THE decision to record caste through an open-ended question in the upcoming Census is an anticlimax. The government wants enumerators to merely record what respondents say, rather than decide whether a particular surname or sub-caste belongs to a recognised caste category. But the choice raises a key question: can a caste enumeration produce meaningful public data without some mechanism of standardisation? The experience of the 2011 Socio-Economic and Caste Census offers a warning. Respondents were allowed to report their caste freely; the exercise produced around 46.7 lakh caste names. The data was ultimately not released in a usable form. Repeating the same basic methodology while expecting a different outcome would be difficult to justify.
