CHENNAI: Rejecting the union government's explanation for excluding official OBC lists from the ongoing caste census software, PMK president Anbumani Ramadoss on Saturday urged the Centre to withdraw its notification and introduce a pre-defined dropdown system to ensure accurate data collection.
Claiming that 1931 was the last time a caste census covering the entire population was conducted in India, Anbumani said a national caste census was now being conducted for the first time in 95 years following decades of advocacy by social justice organisations, including the Pattali Makkal Katchi.
"With house-listing operations completed across the country, population enumeration with caste details commenced on September 1 in Himalayan border states, while states like Tamil Nadu are scheduled to begin the exercise in February," he said.
Anbumani said the PMK was the first party to object to the Centre's decision to leave a blank field for enumerators to manually enter the caste name given by a respondent.
"I wrote to all OBC Members of Parliament regarding this issue, after which the Indian National Congress adopted the same stance," he said.
In a statement, Anbumani said the explanation offered by union government officials for not incorporating the official central and state OBC lists into the census software was weak, unacceptable and failed to justify the decision.
Reports indicate that government officials had considered integrating the central and state Other Backward Classes lists into the census software, allowing respondents to select their respective caste from a pre-defined list.
However, the proposal was allegedly dropped after officials argued that the lists contained "classes" including local inhabitants and traditional mendicants, such as "beggars" or "locally born" groups rather than strictly defined "castes", and that their inclusion could be confusing.
Anbumani said the argument was "completely baseless".
"The fundamental objective of these measures and of the caste census itself is to deliver social justice to those lagging socio-economically," he said, adding that recognising such classes as distinct units for census data collection would not diminish or distort the exercise, but instead help ensure accurate allocation of welfare and reservation benefits.
Conversely, Anbumani said, relying on manual text entry could lead to extreme fragmentation of the data. While India has approximately 4,147 recognised caste groups, he said an open-ended survey method could generate more than 46.7 lakh (4.67 million) variations arising from mismatched entries, alternative spellings and localised names.
"Adopting such a flawed approach to avoid minor technical ambiguities is like burning down the house to get rid of a bedbug," he said, adding that it would "severely harm the cause of social justice".
Demanding that the union government abandon the open-ended text-entry method for recording caste names, Anbumani said the Centre should integrate the Central and State OBC lists into the census software, enabling respondents to select caste names along with their corresponding numeric codes.