Caste census report had over 8 crore errors: Government

NEW DELHI: Dismissing allegations that it was holding back the caste census report to "suppress facts", the government on Tuesday said as many as 8.19 crore errors were found in the caste returns, of which nearly 1.46 crore were yet to be rectified by the respective states.

A total of 8,19,58,314 errors were found in caste particulars and all states and Union Territories were asked to rectify the same. Though the states had rectified 6.73 crore errors, as many as 1.46 crore errors still remained.

For instance, Maharashtra is yet to rectify 69.1 lakh errors, Madhya Pradesh 13.9 lakh, West Bengal 11.6 lakh, Rajasthan 7.2 lakh, UP 5.4 lakh, Karnataka 2.9 lakh, Bihar 1.7 lakh and Tamil Nadu 1.4 lakh.

"The government is fully committed to completing the socio-economic caste census (SECC) and requests the state/UT governments for its fullest cooperation to complete the rectification of errors.

In the meanwhile, the classification of the available caste/tribe data will be taken by the expert group set up by the Cabinet on July 16," a government statement said. The expert group to classify and categorize caste returns is chaired by Niti Aayog chairman Arvind Panagariya.

During review of the SECC on July 16, the government found that 46,73,034 distinct caste names were returned, including caste/sub-caste names, synonyms, surnames, clan/gotra names, phonetic variations, sections, sub-groups etc. "These will have to be classified by experts having domain knowledge on these issues," the government had then said.

On July 3, the government refrained from releasing the caste-based data while releasing data relating to socio-economic features of households in rural areas.

Rural development minister Chaudhary Birender Singh had dismissed suggestions that the government avoided giving the caste count in the survey report due to political reasons ahead of Bihar polls.

However, opposition parties alleged that the government was "hiding the truth from the country" by not releasing the data of SCs, STs, backward classes, minorities and upper classes in the country so as to "minimize the quota for reserved classes cleverly in future".