Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, on Friday, reiterated his demand that caste-based data of the Census of India be made public “to ensure the empowerment of all those lagging behind in development.”
“The Socio Economic Caste Census data 2011 should be made public…I’m saying this not for any caste-based politics but to erase the caste divide itself…the ST/SC census has been carried out after out after independence but the backward castes’ census has not been done, depriving them of proportional representation,” said Mr. Kumar, at a conference on “Social statistics” at Patna, hosted by the Asian Development Research Institute (ADRI).
The conference was inaugurated by Vice-President M. Hamid Ansari.
Mr. Kumar added that “every caste should know its strength and weakness in terms of population and other things.”
Quality of data
The caste-based Census data will also explode several myths about development of backward and marginalised people, he said.
The Chief Minister also stressed the need for ensuring the quality of statistics to measure poverty. “It should not only be on the basis of income but the development indices including education, health, environment and also indicators such as agricultural production and related economic indicators...income alone could not be the basis of poverty measurement”, he said.
Vice President Hamid Ansari also expressed similar concern about the quality of data being generated at different government levels affecting social statistics sector in India.
Bihar Governor Ram Nath Kovind, who was also present, however, said that the agenda of social science research was quite large in an extremely problematic state like Bihar.
“On one hand there are huge development deficits in several sectors while, on the other, there are severe resource constraints, not just in terms of finances, but in terms of human resources as well,” he said.
