NEW DELHI: Congress high-command Mallikarjun Kharge and Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday urged the PM Modi-led government to change the way caste information is being collected in the census, warning that the current method could result in inaccurate data.The grand old party leaders also called for withdrawal of existing questionnaire, terming those “misleading”.Kharge, Rahul requested PM Modi-led government to opt for a different way to detail on caste.In a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the two leaders said accurate caste data was necessary for implementing social justice policies. “The policies of social justice in India cannot be properly implemented without accurate data,” they said.Kharge and Rahul objected to the use of an “open-ended question” to record caste details. Under the system, people can provide the name of their caste, which is then recorded in that form.The Congress leaders said the same caste may be known by different names, sub-castes or local names in different parts of India. If these different names are recorded separately, “a single caste could end up being divided into thousands of names,” they said.They warned that this could lead to a very large number of caste categories and make the data generated by the caste census difficult to use.“If the correct number of members of a community is not recorded, its situation will also be assessed incorrectly,” the two leaders said. They argued that inaccurate data could affect backward, extremely backward and other disadvantaged communities.
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According to Rahul and Kharge, the impact could extend to government decisions on education, employment, welfare schemes and social justice.They also raised concerns over the lack of clarity about the size of country’s Other Backward Classes (OBC) population. “We would not even know how large the OBC population is in India,” they said, pointing out that the term “backward class” is not included in the census process.Another Congress leader Jairam Ramesh also targeted BJP-led Centre over census. Ramesh said, “Government’s current efforts towards a caste census are just whitewash”.
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