Telangana to Include Religious Communities Under Caste Category in Upcoming Survey
Come December, Telangana will become the first state in India to officially include Buddhists, Jains, Sikhs, Christians, and Muslims under the caste category. No other state in the country or the world has done this before.
The Telangana state government has started a comprehensive door-to-door survey to gather data on people’s socio-economic, educational, employment, political, and caste status. The goal of this survey is to help the government plan and implement programs to improve opportunities for Backward Classes (BC), Scheduled Castes (SC), Scheduled Tribes (ST), and other weaker sections of the society.
However, there has been some confusion among the survey’s enumerators. They were unsure whether Jains, Sikhs, and Buddhists should be categorized under religion alone or both religion and caste. An enumerator from Malkajgiri, who spoke to The Hans India, said they were unsure if this was a printing mistake in the manual or if there was another reason behind it.
The survey’s instructional manual assigns codes for different religions. These include Hindu (01), Islam (02), Christian (03), Sikh (04), Bauddha (05), and Jain (06). However, the survey does not provide a specific code for Parsis (Zoroastrians), one of the smallest minority groups in India, and instead places them under the “Others” category (00). This omission has been criticized as a failure to acknowledge the significant contributions of Parsis to the country’s economy, culture, and charitable work.
Additionally, the manual assigns a specific code—085—for the BC-E category, which includes Scheduled Castes who have converted to Christianity and their descendants. Muslims under the BC-E category are given codes ranging from 121 to 134, covering various Muslim sub-castes.
A surprise comes on page 46 of the manual, where the “Other Castes” section (Anexory-D) lists separate caste codes for different religions. For example, Buddhists have the caste code 003, Christians (other than BC-C) are given 004, Jains are listed as 005, Muslims (other than BC-E) are coded 013, Sikhs are assigned 016, and other religions are coded as 000.
Interestingly, while Hindus are given a religious code, they are not mentioned under the “Other Castes” category in the Anexory-D section of the survey’s manual. This has raised further questions about how the caste and religious categories are being handled in the survey.
