The article (July 15) by Dr. M. Vijayanunni, “Where is the caste data?”, appears to have ended up discrediting the entire Socio-Economic Caste Census (SECC). The SECC reports pertaining to rural areas of the country were made public by the Finance Minister on July 3, 2015. Media outlets have analysed them extensively. I have read at least 20 of them. No one has ever doubted the quality of the data as the census has gone through stages of enumeration, supervision, verification and claims and objections to ensure the credibility of the data. Dr. Vijayanunni should have provided credible evidence of wrong data before rushing to conclude that “This poverty survey would become as discredited as its predecessor BPL survey”. Most of us know that Kerala and two more States did not use the data of the predecessor rural BPL census data, but the remaining States and Union Territories did fully utilise the data to identify beneficiaries for various welfare schemes.
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