Supreme Court lets Bihar use caste survey data

Satya Prakash

New Delhi, October 6

The Supreme Court on Friday refused to restrain the Bihar Government from acting upon the recently published data of the caste survey even as it issued a notice to the Nitish Kumar-led government on petitions challenging the validity of the entire exercise.

A Bench led by Justice Sanjiv Khanna, which had earlier refused to stay the Bihar caste survey, turned down repeated requests by the petitioners’ counsel to stay any further action on the caste survey data.

“We cannot stop the state government or any government from taking decisions. That would be wrong,” Justice Khanna told senior counsel Aprajita Singh, who represented the petitioners.

The Bench, however, said, “If there is an issue with regard to the data, that will be considered. We are going to examine the other issue regarding the power of the state government to conduct the exercise.”

Noting that the data had already been collected, the Bench said, “One of the issues will be with regard to the breakdown of the data and whether we should at all touch upon it. If we uphold everything, whether it should be left to….” The top court asked the Bihar Government to file its response to the petitions in four weeks and gave an additional four weeks to the petitioners to file their counter-affidavit and posted the matter for further hearing in January 2024.

On behalf of the petitioners, Singh contended that since the entire data-gathering exercise was “illegal”, the state government should be restrained from acting upon it as the executive order for collection of data was not in conformity with the law laid down by the Supreme Court in the KS Puttaswamy judgment on the right to privacy in 2018.

At one point, the Bench asked the Bihar Government counsel, “Why did you publish the data?”

Senior counsel Shyam Divan, representing the state government, said there was no stay on the publication of the data, which was required for formulating welfare schemes.