Modi govt. wants to put caste census in cold storage: Congress
The Congress has accused the Modi government of playing politics in the name of the women's reservation law and asserted that the proposed delimitation exercise linked to it was "not constitutional"
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Context
The Congress party alleged that the Central government intends to stall a nationwide caste census and amend the Constitution's provisions on women's reservation to defer its implementation. The opposition countered the government's purported reasoning that a caste census is overly time-consuming by highlighting that states like Bihar and Telangana completed comprehensive caste surveys in less than six months.
UPSC Perspectives
Polity
The controversy centers around the , 2023 (Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam), which introduced to provide 33% reservation for women in the Lok Sabha and State Legislative Assemblies. Crucially, this provision contains a deferred implementation clause, stipulating that the reservation will only come into effect after a delimitation exercise based on the relevant figures of the first conducted after the Act's commencement. This legal prerequisite makes the timeline highly uncertain and politically sensitive. If the government wishes to alter the timeline or decouple the quota from the census, it would require passing a new amendment bill under , necessitating a special majority in Parliament.
Governance
The operationalization of women's reservation is directly tied to the unfreezing of electoral boundaries by the . Currently, the allocation of seats in the Lok Sabha is frozen until the relevant figures for the first census taken after the year 2026 are published. The ongoing political debate hinges on whether the government will integrate a socio-economic caste enumeration within the upcoming, already delayed national census. If the government amends to bypass the delimitation prerequisite, it could allow for immediate implementation of the women's quota, but the opposition suspects this legislative maneuver is a pretext to permanently shelf the demands for a comprehensive caste enumeration.
Social
The opposition argues that a nationwide caste census is logistically feasible within a short timeframe, citing the successful as a precedent. Constitutionally, conducting the decennial population census is exclusively a Union power listed under Entry 69 of the Union List in the Seventh Schedule. However, states have navigated around this by legally framing their exercises as socio-economic "surveys" rather than a formal census, aimed at gathering data to rationalize state-level affirmative action and welfare schemes. UPSC aspirants must distinguish between a statutory national census conducted under the Census Act of 1948 and state-led administrative data collection drives, as this distinction dictates the legal validity of the collected data.