The questionnaire or the schedule for the population enumeration phase of Census 2027, which has gone live in Ladakh and snow-bound areas of three other States ahead of the rest of the country, seeks information on religion, date of birth and place of birth up to the village level of both the father and mother, according to the questions seen by The Hindu .
The open-field methodology to record caste has been questioned by the Congress. “The conclusion is clear: the Modi Govt wants to simply sabotage the caste census. He is an U-turn ustad,” Mr.
The PM had made a complete U-turn on April 30, 2025 and announced that a caste census – which he had earlier attacked as an “urban naxal” idea – would take place. Ramesh said.
Now he has done another U-turn on his earlier U-turn and without saying so has buried the idea of a caste census. On Tuesday, Congress leader Jairam Ramesh, in a post on X, accused the government of sabotaging the caste Census.
Unlike Census data, which can only be released in an aggregate form up to the village level, the NPR database can be shared with States and other government departments. The data have never been released by the government. Only the Union Government can issue the SC/ST list after being ratified by Parliament. It would have been ideal for the Registry of Castes that there should have been given a drop-down menu for selection of the castes which could have made some consistent data available which can be relied upon. Such a menu had, in fact, been prepared prior to the caste surveys both in Bihar and Telangana.
He said that on September 21, 2021, the Union Government had filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court categorically rejecting the plea for a caste census. “However, Para 12 (d) in the affidavit says the following: ‘There was no registry of caste prepared prior to the conduct of 2011 Census. The question now is this: why does Census 2027 NOT have this drop-down menu that the Modi Government recommended in the affidavit it submitted to the Supreme Court in Sept 2021? Such a menu had also been suggested by the Congress President in his letter to the PM of May 5, 2025,” he said. The total number of castes recorded during the 1931 Census was 4,147. The SECC was conducted as a survey outside the purview of the Census Act, 1948 and had no statutory backing.
The open-field method had resulted in the 2011 Socio-Economic Caste Census (SECC) returning over 46 lakh different “caste names”, largely owing to the differences in what people understood by caste. Significantly, the government has consistently maintained over the last decade that the 2011 SECC’s caste data were unreliable because of “errors” in data collection.
