Bihar is planning to conduct a State-specific caste-based exercise.
The issue
The Union government had told the Supreme Court that the caste-based data enumerated in the Socio-Economic Caste Census (SECC) of 2011 was “unusable”.
But in 2016, the Registrar-General and Census Commissioner of India had informed the Standing Committee on Rural Development that 98.87% of the data on individual caste and religion was “error-free”.
Why “unusable”?
The government had said that the total number of castes surveyed in 1931 was 4,147 while the 2011 SECC figures show that there are more than 46 lakh different castes.
The entire exercise was corrupted because the enumerators had used different spellings for the same castes.
In many cases, the respondents had refused to divulge their castes.