Caste census: One community, many names — BC Dal flags counting challenge

The National BC Dal has expressed serious concern over a central challenge in the caste census proposed by the Centre: how a single social community, known by different names across regions, States and linguistic contexts, will eventually be counted as one.

At a meeting in Hyderabad on Monday (September 14, 2026), the organisation's president, Dundra Kumaraswamy, said variations arising from regional nomenclature, sub-caste identities, local usage, pronunciation and spelling could result in multiple entries for what may, in social terms, represent the same community.

The key question, he said, is not merely how caste identities are recorded, but how different names and expressions referring to the same social reality are later identified, classified and reconciled to arrive at an accurate population count.

Mr. Kumaraswamy said caste enumeration cannot be treated as a mere exercise in collecting names. Every individual response, he pointed out, eventually becomes part of a larger national statistical record, with potential implications for understanding the country's social composition and for informing public policy.

“If members of the same community were recorded under multiple names and those entries were not scientifically linked and consolidated, the resulting data could fragment the numerical representation of that community,” he cautioned.

He called for a transparent and technically robust framework to address regional variations, sub-caste identities and linguistic differences, with clear standards for classification and aggregation.

“If one community is scattered across the census under a hundred different names, what may be lost is not merely a number, but the community's collective identity in the official record,” he said.

Caste has not been counted in full in Independent India's decennial census since 1931, though data on Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes has been collected in every round. Demands for a caste count have been raised by parties across the political spectrum for decades. Bihar conducted its own caste survey in 2023, and several other States have since debated or commissioned similar exercises.

The last full census was held in 2011, and the round due in 2021 was postponed. The Centre has said caste will be included in the coming census, an exercise that will involve recording responses from every State and Union Territory in multiple languages.

Because responses are collected in different languages, and communities often use varied names and spellings for themselves, the reliability of the final count will depend substantially on how equivalent entries are matched and consolidated without merging groups that are actually distinct.

The National BC Dal said clear standards for classification and aggregation were essential to the credibility of the exercise, and that the framework should be technically sound and open to scrutiny.

The organisation said the value of the census — and of the policy decisions that follow from it — will depend on how carefully these variations are handled.