Editorial: Rid policymaking of guesswork

Last Saturday, the Congress government in Telangana launched its promised statewide caste census. Over the next three weeks, 80,000 enumerators will go door to door collecting data on the caste identity and social, economic, political and educational status of 1.17 crore households in the state. Chief Minister Revanth Reddy has described the survey as a 'historic and revolutionary' moment for Telangana. Indeed, this is the first caste census in the state since 1931. However, it is not the first attempt since Independence to take readings on socioeconomic backwardness in the region.

In the erstwhile undivided state of Andhra Pradesh, of which Telangana was a part until 2014, two inquiries, one by the Anantharaman Commission in 1970 and the second by the Muralidhar Rao Commission in 1982, assessed the condition of the Backward Classes (BCs). The current caste-based reservation regime in the state, with quotas of 29 percent for BCs, 15 per cent for Scheduled Castes and 10 per cent for Scheduled Tribes (STs), is broadly informed by their findings.

The Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) government of K Chandrasekhar Rao, Revanth Reddy’s predecessor, did commission a socioeconomic survey of households in 2014 but it did not specifically enumerate on the basis of caste. Nevertheless, its findings indicated that the proportion of tribal people had increased in the new state of Telangana from 6 per cent to 9.3 percent as a result of its carving out from Andhra Pradesh. This formed the basis for the BRS government’s decision to increase reservation for STs to 10 percent.

There is every possibility that the current caste census in Telangana will bring to light other such demographic changes, based on which distribution of economic opportunities in general, and reservations in particular, will have to be revised. The caste survey in Bihar, for instance, found that the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) comprise 61.3 percent of the population, much more than catered to by the reservation regime. Even more acutely, Extremely Backward Classes were found to be 36 per cent, which underlines the need for policy to be more fine-tuned to serve the neediest sections.

In the context of Telangana, the most eagerly awaited data from the caste census would be the exact proportion of the BC population. This has been a hotly-debated issue since the days of the Hyderabad state in independent India. With dominant castes holding sway in politics, welfare policy was by and large based on suppositions about the BC number. The Anantharaman Commission identified 93 communities as socially and educationally backward and suggested they constituted about 50 percent of the population. The Muralidhar Rao Commission recommended that approximately 52 percent of the population be classified as backward classes. The BRS government survey of 2014 guessed that BCs were approximately 51 per cent. Backward class political leaders and activists on the other hand have always claimed that their true number would be above 65 percent.

The current census is welcome because it promises to deliver accurate data on the matter and we can take guesswork out of policymaking. However, we need to answer some corollary questions that arise at this moment: While reservations must of course be tweaked to ensure equitable distribution of opportunity, why limit it to jobs and education? Why not extend the principle to politics? Why not proportionally reserve seats in the legislature? And why leave minorities out of reservations?