CHENNAI: PMK president and Rajya Sabha member Anbumani Ramadoss on Sunday urged MPs across all political parties to prevail upon the union government to revise the data collection method for the upcoming caste census.
He emphasised that enumerators should select castes from pre-loaded official lists rather than leaving text fields blank for open responses.
In a letter in English, Tamil and Hindi written to all Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha members, the former Union minister highlighted alleged flaws in the reported methodology planned by the Registrar General of India (RGI) for the second phase of individual data collection starting this September.
Stating that reports indicate that the RGI plans to leave the caste response column blank and record whatever name citizens provide, Ramadoss warned that this open-ended method would cause massive administrative confusion.
"Because people frequently cite sub-castes rather than officially recognised caste categories, recording raw inputs would falsely inflate the number of castes and render the collected data unusable for social justice policies", he claimed.
Proposing a solution, the PMK leader suggested integrating the existing Central and State caste lists directly into the digital census application's software.
"Enumerators could then select the appropriate caste from the dropdown list during household visits," he added.
He pointed out that this drop-down model was successfully used during state-level surveys in Bihar (2023) and Telangana (2024), yielding highly accurate and reliable demographic data.
Calling on MPs to act swiftly before the enumeration begins on September 1, he stated that "failing to fix the data entry methodology now would permanently derail the accuracy of India's social justice calculations".