Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge and Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi have written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi requesting that the current draft questionnaire for the upcoming caste census be withdrawn and replaced with a revised instrument built around a standardized, drop-down list of caste entries. According to a report in The Hindu, the two senior Congress leaders argue that a single, searchable list of castes, drawn up in consultation with sociologists, demographers and other specialists, would prevent the same social groups from being recorded under different names, sub-caste labels, or linguistic variations, and would produce more usable data for policy and welfare targeting.
The letter, sent days before the government prepares to roll out the first phase of the enumeration, marks a direct intervention by the principal opposition party in the technical design of one of the most politically sensitive exercises India has undertaken in recent decades. It also signals that the caste census, long treated as a back-burner policy question, has moved to the centre of parliamentary contention.
What the proposal contains
In the letter, Kharge and Gandhi set out three principal recommendations. First, they ask that the existing draft questionnaire be cancelled and replaced with one that uses a drop-down menu format, allowing enumerators and respondents to select a caste from a pre-validated list rather than write names freely. The Congress leaders argue that this approach would eliminate inconsistencies that arise when the same community is recorded under phonetic or regional variants of its name, when titular and territorial suffixes are treated as separate castes, or when transliteration from the vernacular produces multiple spellings.
Second, they point to the caste surveys already conducted in Bihar and Telangana as practical models for how such a list can be assembled and tested at scale. The Bihar caste survey, completed in 2023, and the earlier Telangana Socio-Economic, Educational, Employment, Political and Caste Survey of 2014 are cited in the letter as evidence that a granular, list-based methodology can yield reliable, comparable data across districts and regions. Both surveys produced district- and community-level breakdowns that have since been used by their respective state governments to redesign welfare schemes, scholarship eligibility, and reservation rosters.
Third, the Congress leaders urge the government to convene a broad panel of experts before finalizing the questionnaire, including sociologists, demographers, anthropologists, statisticians and representatives of civil society, so that the list of categories is validated against the lived experience of caste identity rather than relying solely on the lists prepared by the Registrar General of India and the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment.
Why it matters
India’s decennial population census has historically recorded caste only for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, leaving the rest of the social order uncounted. The decision to enumerate all castes in the 2026 exercise, announced by the Union government after years of demand from opposition parties, state governments, and a cross-section of civil society, is expected to generate the first comprehensive national dataset on caste in more than nine decades. The data produced will shape the distribution of welfare spending, the calibration of affirmative action, and the political arithmetic of reservation for years to come.
The accuracy of that dataset depends almost entirely on the questionnaire. If the same community is recorded under multiple names across districts, the resulting counts will be fragmented and unreliable. If sub-castes that constitute a single political bloc are recorded separately, the dataset may understate their share of the population, weakening their claim to a share of reservations or welfare resources. Conversely, a list that is too rigid, and that fails to recognize the granularity of caste as it is actually lived, could exclude communities or force respondents into categories that do not match their self-identification.
The Congress letter is therefore directed at the technical heart of the exercise. The party’s leaders are arguing that without a standardized instrument, the caste census risks producing numbers that are politically contentious and administratively difficult to use, precisely the outcome the government has said it wants to avoid.
Background and context
Debate over the design of a national caste enumeration has been running since at least 2018, when the then Bihar government under Chief Minister Nitish Kumar commissioned a state-level caste survey in the run-up to the 2024 general election. The Bihar survey, the largest such exercise undertaken by any Indian state, was completed in two phases and produced a headcount of more than 214 castes, sub-castes and communities. Its findings, which showed several OBC and MBC groups to be more populous than had been assumed, complicated the state’s reservation framework and prompted a legal challenge that is still being adjudicated.
The Telangana survey, conducted shortly after the formation of the new state in 2014, was an even more ambitious exercise, attempting a near-universal headcount of every household’s caste alongside economic and educational indicators. Its methodology, including the use of enumeration blocks of approximately 120 households, has been studied by demographers as a possible template for national use.
The Union government’s decision to include a full caste count in the 2026 census was widely seen as a response to the political pressure generated by these state exercises and by successive Supreme Court orders directing states to produce empirical data on the social and educational backwardness of communities claiming reservation. The Registrar General of India is understood to have circulated a draft questionnaire to selected ministries and to the office of the Prime Minister earlier this year, but the contents have not been made public.
The Congress’s own position on caste enumeration has shifted over time. The party blocked a national caste census under the United Progressive Alliance government, citing concerns about how the data would be used. The current leadership, under Kharge and Gandhi, has been among the most vocal advocates of a comprehensive count, and the letter to the Prime Minister is consistent with the party’s stated position that the exercise should be conducted thoroughly or not at all.
What to watch next
The government’s response to the Congress letter will set the tone for the coming phase of the exercise. The Ministry of Home Affairs, which oversees the census through the Registrar General, has not publicly commented on the proposal. A formal reply from the Prime Minister’s Office, whether accepting the recommendations, rejecting them, or proposing a consultation, will be the first clear signal of how the government intends to balance the political sensitivities of caste enumeration against the technical demands of accurate data collection.
Several specific questions remain open. It is not yet clear whether the Registrar General will incorporate a drop-down list into the final questionnaire or continue with an open-ended format. The list of castes that will be included, and the process by which it is finalized, has not been disclosed. The role of state governments, which have primary responsibility for the welfare schemes that depend on caste data, in validating the list has also not been defined.
Analysts will also be watching the position of state governments that have already conducted their own surveys, particularly in Bihar, where the political stakes are highest. If the Centre adopts a methodology significantly different from the Bihar model, the resulting national data may not be comparable with state-level figures, complicating the work of state commissions reviewing reservation.
The Supreme Court, which has been monitoring the use of caste data in the context of the EWS reservation, may also be drawn into the process if the questionnaire is challenged as inadequate or as infringing on the right of communities to self-identify.
Analysis
The call for a revised questionnaire reflects a tension that runs through the entire caste census project: the need for a list that is at once comprehensive enough to capture the granularity of Indian caste society and standardized enough to be aggregated into a single, comparable national dataset. The Congress proposal leans toward standardization, with a drop-down list that reduces the scope for enumerator discretion and respondent self-description. The countervailing risk, which several demographers have flagged in the context of state-level surveys, is that a list that is not carefully validated can collapse distinct communities into larger categories, or, conversely, preserve distinctions that have no empirical basis.
The Bihar and Telangana surveys offer a partial answer to this tension, in that both relied on extensive field validation before the final list was frozen. Whether the national exercise, which is being conducted on a vastly larger scale and under tighter time constraints, can replicate that level of validation is the central operational question. The Congress letter’s emphasis on expert consultation is, in effect, a request for the kind of preparatory work that the state surveys had years to complete.
There is also a political dimension that the technical debate cannot fully be separated from. The caste census has been demanded, in different forms, by parties across the political spectrum, including by BJP allies in states such as Bihar. The Congress letter is likely to be read, in part, as an attempt by the opposition to position itself as the party that pushed for a more accurate count, and to set the terms of the debate if the final data is disputed. The government’s handling of the proposal will determine whether the exercise is seen as a genuine attempt to map India’s social structure or as a politically managed exercise whose findings were determined in advance.
Conclusion
The Kharge-Gandhi letter to the Prime Minister is a procedural intervention with political overtones. By asking for a fresh questionnaire built around a standardized drop-down list, validated by experts and informed by the Bihar and Telangana surveys, the Congress leadership is seeking to influence the technical design of the 2026 caste census at a moment when the instrument is still being finalized. The government’s response, and the methodology that ultimately emerges, will determine whether the first national caste headcount in more than 90 years produces a dataset that can withstand both statistical scrutiny and political challenge.
Sources
The Hindu – “Rahul Gandhi, Kharge write letter to PM Modi, ask for current census questionnaire to be cancelled,” https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/rahul-gandhi-kharge-write-letter-to-pm-modi-asks-for-current-census-questionnaire-to-be-cancelled/article71387810.ece
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Story synopsis gathered from: The Hindu – National — source
