Why caste in census is necessary

Recently, I was explaining to a French friend of mine on how the concept of caste reservation works in India. He was quite amused. And that’s when I was explaining my side of the argument why the recent census should definitely record the caste information.

Not more than a century ago, Indian societies were divided into various castes. A person’s caste decided his/her occupation, education, intellectual level and most importantly the social status he/she enjoyed in the society. Obviously post independence, the new India wanted to shy away from all these things. Reservations were introduced, which was a logical choice and indeed the right one to empower the ‘backward classes’.

It’s been sixty three years since Independence and 20 years since the economic liberation. Things have changed drastically. While one naturally expects the reservation system to be fading away, the government drops the bombshell in 2007 and implements reservation system in all IIMs and IITs, the premier institutes of the country. The interesting point to note here is that Supreme court, the most respectable and autonomous legal body in the entire country, sided with the government. Why? Frankly, they just had one set of data to refer to - provided by the Mandal Commission. No other reliable data was available to disprove the fact that reservation was not needed. The last caste based census was done during the British rule in 1931!

The actual fact is, nobody knows what is the current state of affairs with respect to the caste system in India. We can argue for and against the reservation system for hours, but most arguments are subjective which would either address the injustice meted out to the forward classes or how the backward classes are still in the phase of development. But, is a growing economy good enough metric to conclude that the backward classes are no more backward? Are they enjoying social equality in terms of education and job opportunities? We can’t say anything about it unless we have the data. Let’s say that, in a few years from now, the issue crops up again and public interest petitions are filed in Supreme court. What could the court do?

This is why recording the caste information, in my opinion, is of utmost importance. Because, it will give an idea on what’s happening around the country. Does caste correlate with the education/job of a person? What are the classes that needs to be re-categorized as General category? What should go back into backward class? Are there any improvements to the SC/ST sections? And most of all, is the reservation system working? So many questions could be answered.

The people who opposed recording caste in the census fear that people may downgrade their caste to get government benefits. While a few people would misreport their caste information to exploit this opportunity, most Indians are too proud of their castes to actually disown it. So, the number of such happenings might not be that significant. There is no place for sampling errors as well since it is a complete population sampling. Also, the NSS data sampled every few years hasn't been of much help either.

We can also rule out the possibility of having a reservation based system based on economic conditions. There is too much irregularity in reporting household incomes in this country which makes it totally senseless to implement a reservation based on economic background. May be a couple of decades later.

Caste based census is an excellent opportunity for analysis. It may not change things immediately, but it is a decent start to figure out what the problem actually is. We’ll have enough data to make critical decisions on the future of reservation systems in this country.

My $0.02

We should accept with shame that majority of the marriages in India are still based on caste system (even the most educated are paranoid about this). Unless inter-caste, inter-religion marriages are becoming the order of the day to a level where the parents get confused to which caste the child belongs to, caste is not going to go away so easily. Periyar, an activist who fought the caste system, once said that the only way to remove caste system from this society is through inter-caste marriages.

By the laws of nature, reservation is a crime. Ideally ‘Survival of the fittest’ should be the mantra. The person who deserves something should definitely get it and should not be denied the chance since just because he belongs to a forward class. But it was us humans who created the caste system and it is our duty to clean the mess.