- As is its wont, the Indian political class is at it again. The growing calls for carrying out the caste-based census are gaining traction across the length and breadth simply because none of our political parties would let go an opportunity to position themselves to favour curry amongst the electorate. Even after seven and a half decades of independence, the political class panders to castes to stay relevant or improve their lot riding on parochial considerations sadly reflects the preponderance of identity politics rather than simple merit-based policies. The clamouring for quotas and reservations in government jobs and education is growing from even those classified as majority communities.
PC: Shoaib Daniyal
- Thus, the concerns expressed from the marginalized and deprived category eating into their already existing quotas will only lead to calls for a further increase in the reservation percentage. And the vicious circle of appeasement politics keeps churning perpetually. As humanity progresses riding on spectacular technology-driven developments, it is baffling to note how our political think-tank proceeds to embrace counterproductive measures like caste-based census to further demand reservations and quotas for the historically deprived lot.
- Rather than providing a level playing field for equal opportunities largely based on merit, encouragement, and enterprising qualities, efforts at seeking a national caste census simply defeat the purpose of uplifting deprived and poverty-ridden populace by provisioning education and job opportunities. For any programme or scheme to succeed, the availability of accurate data and statistics is a must which is also central to India’s effort to dent poverty. Therefore, improving the existing database is more crucial to this than caste counts. Poor data hurts efforts to design any welfare programmes as much.
PC: City today
- As such, if caste is about deprivation, counting the deprivation is more important than identifying the caste of everyone. Against this backdrop, India’s National Sample Survey (NSS) is unique for the extensive and periodic household-level data it generates. Note that many of the Union Government’s policies, including the inflation targeting framework based on consumer expenditure surveys, is based on the NSS data. You would be surprised that several key welfare schemes are based on work carried out by NSS and other arms of the government way back in 2011-12. We are basing our welfare schemes based on decades-old data.
- The bedrock of welfare schemes such as the ones for LPG cylinders and rural housing is initiated based on the consumer expenditure survey (68th round) and the Socio-Economic and Caste Census (SECC) 2011. An update on these crucial parameters should have been prioritized. Dismally, the nation has not had an estimate of even poverty since July 2013 indicating that whatever policies undertaken today are being driven by a rather old database. Therefore, it’s more important for the Union Government to pay attention to this anomaly before embarking on a new exercise when even the Census 2021 enumeration has been delayed by the pandemic. For what is at stake is the future progression of the aspirational country largely carried forward by the younger generation who looks up for opportunities and a level playing field.
