The Socio-Economic and Caste Census 2011 (SECC 2011) is a comprehensive, household-level data collection exercise, distinct from the decennial population Census. It was designed as an administrative and policy-oriented database to identify and rank households based on their socio-economic status for targeted welfare delivery. The exercise was approved by the Manmohan Singh government in 2010 and launched on June 29, 2011.
The SECC was created because the regular Census data is confidential under the Census of India Act, 1948, and cannot be used for direct beneficiary identification. The SECC aimed to solve the problem of outdated poverty lists and the lack of current, disaggregated caste data, which had not been collected since the 1931 Census.
The mechanism involved three components: the Rural SECC by the Ministry of Rural Development, the Urban SECC by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation, and the Caste Census component. It was a paperless census conducted on hand-held electronic devices. Beneficiary identification is based on a three-step process using thirteen Automatic Exclusion parameters, five Automatic Inclusion parameters, and seven Deprivation Criteria to rank households. Unlike the regular Census, the personal information is open for use by government departments to grant benefits.
The SECC data is crucial for implementing major government welfare schemes like MGNREGA, the National Food Security Act, and Pradhan Mantri Awaas Yojana-Gramin. The socio-economic data, published in 2016, is now the main instrument for identifying beneficiaries in rural areas, replacing older poverty line methodologies. However, the caste data collected in the SECC has not been made public, except for the total numbers of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.