The Socio-Economic Caste Census 2011 (SECC 2011) is a comprehensive data collection exercise and survey, not an act or a permanent institution, conducted by the Government of India. It was created to generate a database of households' socio-economic status and caste affiliation, allowing for the ranking of households based on predefined parameters. The exercise was launched on June 29, 2011, by the Ministry of Rural Development, and was the first caste-based census since the 1931 Census of India. The primary problem it aimed to solve was the lack of granular data to accurately identify and target beneficiaries for government welfare schemes.
The SECC 2011 was a paperless census, conducted using hand-held electronic devices. It was administered by three separate authorities: the Ministry of Rural Development for rural areas, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation for urban areas, and the Ministry of Home Affairs for the caste component. The mechanism for identifying the poor uses a three-stage process: automatic exclusion based on 14 parameters (e.g., owning a motorized vehicle or paying income tax), automatic inclusion based on 5 parameters (e.g., being a destitute or manual scavenger), and ranking the remaining households using 7 deprivation indicators (e.g., having only one room with kucha walls and roof).
The SECC data is a critical input for evidence-based policy-making and connects directly to major welfare schemes like the National Food Security Act (NFSA), the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), and the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY). Unlike the regular Census, the SECC was not conducted under the Census Act, 1948, which allows the personal information to be used by government departments for granting benefits. A significant change occurred in January 2017, when the Central Government accepted recommendations to use the SECC data as the main instrument for identifying beneficiaries for social schemes in rural areas, replacing the earlier poverty line estimates. However, the disaggregated caste data collected by the SECC was not made public.