Backward Classes group raises concern over challenges to caste census

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National BC Dal president Dundra Kumaraswamy said caste enumeration could not be treated as a mere exercise in collecting names, as every individual response would eventually become part of a larger national statistical record with potential implications for understanding the country’s social composition and informing public policy. | Photo Credit: Nagara Gopal

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

Participating in a meeting in Hyderabad on Monday (September 14, 2026), the National BC Dal 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, therefore, he said, was not merely how caste identities would be recorded but how different names and expressions referring to the same social reality would subsequently be identified, classified and reconciled to arrive at an accurate population count.

He said caste enumeration could not be treated as a mere exercise in collecting names, as every individual response would eventually become part of a larger national statistical record with potential implications for understanding the country’s social composition and 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. Mr. Kumarsawamy 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.

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