NEW DELHI: India is preparing to count caste as part of the decadal Census nationally after decades, but a battle has already begun with the Opposition asking if the process is foolproof. The Congress party has questioned the way castes will be recorded in Census 2027, particularly the decision to use an open-ended question rather than a prepared list or drop-down menu of castes. The party alleges that there is a “deep conspiracy” to undercount the Other Backward Classes (OBCs).
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To mount the ‘caste’ attack on the Narendra Modi-led Centre, the Congress has used the Union government’s own assessment of the Socio-Economic and Caste Census 2011 data to question the Census 2027. The Congress also accused the Modi government of “deliberately excluding the Other Backward Classes (OBC) category from the Census 2027 questionnaire”, which it said, was a “deep conspiracy” to keep the community’s actual population in the dark.
In a 2021 affidavit before the Supreme Court, the Centre said a caste registry and drop-down menu could have made the data more consistent. Rajya Sabha MP Jairam Ramesh has now asked why Census 2027 does not use a system the government itself had called “ideal”. He has also pointed to Bihar and Telangana, where predefined caste lists and codes were used, and warned that an open-ended question could again produce unreliable caste data.
India is preparing to count caste as part of the decadal Census nationally after decades, but a battle has already begun with the Opposition asking if the process is foolproof. The Congress party has questioned the way castes will be recorded in Census 2027, particularly the decision to use an open-ended question rather than a prepared list or drop-down menu of castes. The party alleges that there is a “deep conspiracy” to undercount the Other Backward Classes (OBCs).
Bihar and Telangana used predefined caste lists and codes in their caste surveys to make the counting more accurate.
The All India OBC Students Association (AIOBCSA) has also criticised retaining an open-ended caste column. Meanwhile, the Mandal Army’s national president, Aniruddh Singh Vidrohi, has called for a National Caste Master Registry, standard codes and a system to map different spellings and local names of the same caste. Activist Yogendra Yadav had also warned against repeating the open-ended approach used in the SECC 2011.
This debate comes at a consequential moment when Census 2027 is set to enumerate castes beyond Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes nationally for the first time in independent India. The Census question has also landed at a time when competing narratives over caste and reservation have returned to the streets and social media.
The row comes months before the Uttar Pradesh Assembly election, with parties already gearing up for the contest.
Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav, who has moved to woo the 8% Brahmins of Uttar Pradesh, has promised a caste census within three months if an SP government came to power. The Samajwadi Party is a part of the Congress-led INDIA bloc, and they together won 43 seats in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls in the state (out of 80 seats). It was an increase of 37 seats.
On August 14, the Centre notified the 40 questions for the second Population Enumeration phase of Census 2027, when details about every individual, including caste, will be collected. Item 10 is “Scheduled Caste (SC)/Scheduled Tribe (ST)/Caste”, which would be open-ended, The Hindu reported, adding that the enumerator will record the caste or sub-caste as declared by the respondent.
The format was retained after a pre-test conducted in July across 16 states and Union Territories, according to a report in The New Indian Express.
“A nationwide pre-test for phase-I covering around 5,000 census blocks was conducted in November 2025 to validate the methodology, digital tools and training systems,” according to a backgrounder by the Press Information Bureau.
That sounds straightforward. But India has thousands of castes and sub-castes, whose names can change with region, language, spelling and local usage. The challenge, therefore, is ensuring that different names referring to the same social group are ultimately identified and coded together.
This is precisely where Congress has raised objections.
Congress MP Jairam Ramesh has alleged that the “methodology of asking Qs on caste in Census 2027 is deliberately flawed.”
Earlier, in a post on X, he had said it had been widely expected that enumerators would carry a pre-prepared, state-wise caste list, as was done during caste surveys in Bihar and Telangana, and simply mark the appropriate response. The absence of such a list, he said, raised “serious doubts” over the government’s intent, said Ramesh, a Rajya Sabha MP from Karnataka.
The Congress also accused the Modi government of deliberately excluding the Other Backward Classes (OBC) category from the census questionnaire. It alleged that the omission was part of a “deep conspiracy” to keep the community’s actual population out of official data.
By and large, the BJP has been able to garner the support of the OBC voters in the recent elections.
