The 2011 Socio Economic and Caste Census (SECC) is a comprehensive, nationwide data collection exercise, distinct from the decennial Census of India, designed to create a detailed picture of household deprivation and socio-economic status. It was approved by the Manmohan Singh government after discussion in Parliament in 2010 and launched on June 29, 2011.
The SECC was created to solve two major problems: first, to provide a more realistic, data-driven method for identifying households below the poverty line (BPL) for welfare targeting; and second, to collect disaggregated caste data, which had not been publicly available since the 1931 Census.
The mechanism involved a door-to-door enumeration, which was the first paperless census in India, conducted on hand-held electronic devices. The exercise had three components, with the rural part conducted by the Ministry of Rural Development and the urban part by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation. Households are ranked for welfare targeting using a three-step process involving automatic exclusion, automatic inclusion, and deprivation criteria.
The SECC is a critical tool for policy, connecting directly to the implementation of flagship government schemes like MGNREGA, the National Food Security Act (NFSA), and the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY), by identifying beneficiaries. A key distinction is that the SECC was not conducted under the Census Act, 1948, unlike the regular Census. While the socio-economic data was finalized and published, the full caste data was not officially released due to concerns over accuracy and political sensitivity. The central government stated in 2021 that the census was outdated and inaccurate.