More than a month after the Union government notified the questionnaire for the second phase of the 2027 Census , finalising an open-column method to record caste, officials told The Hindu that a decision is yet to be taken on how the government will sort, tabulate, and rationalise the data collected through this method.
The government official added that once a holistic proposal is prepared by the Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India on the method for sorting the data, this file is sent up the chain to the Union Home Secretary, following which the government will take a final decision, either at the level of the Ministry or the Union Cabinet. Speaking to The Hindu , scholar, linguist, and cultural activist, Professor G.N. A senior government official said that discussions on how to make sense of the caste data returned through the 2027 Census forms have not yet been initiated, adding that this will happen as the fieldwork on the exercise progresses over the coming months.
Officials said that each division of the Census office would have to handle the tabulation process for the questions that they are responsible for, after which the file on this methodology is forwarded to the top bureaucrat in the Ministry of Home Affairs. Devy said the Office of the Census Commissioner should have ideally included experts in the discussions on finalising the questions, adding that doubts about the method of post-data collection analysis would have also been addressed at this stage, had the government taken this approach. “The only intent the government seems to have in delaying the finalisation of post-data collection methodologies is that they want to postpone releasing the data in the name of rationalisation,” Mr. Devy said.
