Hyderabad: The Telangana government is developing a new way to measure social and economic inequality across communities. A special team of experts will create a Composite Backwardness Index (CBI) using data from the recent caste census.
This effort is being led by Justice Sudarshan Reddy, who heads a panel of nine full-time members. These experts come from fields like sociology, economics, law, statistics, caste studies, history, and public policy. They are working without pay to analyze the results of the Social Education Employment Economic Political Caste (SEEEPC) Survey 2024.
The survey is one of the most detailed ever done in Telangana, covering 3.55 crore people. It collected data in 75 different categories for each person, including education, income, jobs, housing, social identity, and more. The survey includes people across 243 sub-castes, and also gives options for those who identify with no caste or belong to unlisted groups.
The panel has already met four times—three times in Hyderabad and once in New Delhi at the Constitution Club. They are now moving into the next stage of their work: drafting a report based on the survey findings.
This report will rank each sub-caste based on how disadvantaged they are, using the CBI score. It will also provide separate rankings in seven key areas used for the evaluation.
To make the data more useful, the expert group has suggested using Artificial Intelligence to create a natural language search tool. This would allow researchers to access the survey data in a user-friendly way, without exposing any personal or household-level details.
The final report is expected to be submitted to the Telangana government within the next month.
