Cabinet Secy holds meet to work out Census modalities

With the government having notified the process of conducting the Census on Monday, Cabinet Secretary TV Somanathan on Tuesday held a meeting with the Registrar General of India (RGI) and other senior Home Ministry officials. The meetings is learnt to have focused on modalities of the exercise, especially on inclusion of castes.

According to sources, the Cabinet Secretary is learnt to have discussed pros and cons related to harmonisation of various sets of data related to the Census work, with the focus specially on ensuring that there was no data breach, as this time the entire process is going to be conducted digitally.

In addition, the government also faces the challenge of updating the central list of OBCs as it will be required in order to enumerate castes, sources said.

As states also have their own lists of OBCs, these too will require to be updated, if these come up for reference for caste enumeration, the sources said.

While till now, the Census enumeration forms had three categories namely for SCs, STs and others, there is a possibility of including OBCs as the third category in the place of ‘others’, the sources indicated.

The SCs were notified as Number 1, STs as Number 2 and others as Number 3 by enumerators till now in the forms, the sources said, adding that in the forthcoming exercise, OBCs could be inserted as the third category.

In the current scenario, under the ‘others’ category, even those belonging to ‘general’ category were bracketed with the OBCs. However, officials will now have to work out the modalities as to where the ‘general’ category population be placed if the OBCs were mentioned as the third category in the form.

India