Tamil Nadu Congress launches campaign over Centre’s caste census method

• The Tamil Nadu Congress will hold public meetings and discussions across 10 major cities as part of its statewide campaign.

• The party opposes open-ended questions for recording caste and wants a drop-down system based on existing community lists.

• TNCC president Manickam Tagore alleged that the proposed method could undercount OBC communities and weaken their access to representation and welfare benefits.

The Tamil Nadu Congress Committee (TNCC) will begin a statewide campaign on Thursday against what it considers major flaws in the Centre’s proposed method for collecting caste information during the population census.

TNCC president and Virudhunagar MP Manickam Tagore said the campaign would be conducted across 10 major cities through public meetings and interactive discussions.

The party will oppose the use of open-ended questions to record caste details and press for a drop-down system containing predefined community lists. It argues that such a format would reduce mistakes, prevent duplication and generate more dependable data for shaping reservation and social justice policies.

AICC general secretary and Tamil Nadu in-charge Ghulam Ahmad Mir and Dravidar Kazhagam president K. Veeramani are expected to attend the campaign’s launch.

Tagore alleged that the BJP-led Union government was attempting to obscure the actual size of the Other Backward Classes population and prevent backward communities from securing adequate representation.

He claimed that the Centre had previously deferred the caste census by citing concerns related to delimitation. It has now proposed using open-ended questions to collect details concerning Scheduled Castes and OBCs, on the grounds that no comprehensive list of OBC communities is available.

Tagore questioned the rationale behind the proposed format when established lists already exist for Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe communities.

He alleged that the approach was intended to deny backward communities their rightful representation in political institutions, education and employment.

The second phase of the population census will include the collection of caste-related information. The exercise is expected to have significant implications for reservation, representation and the design of welfare programmes.

Tagore maintained that providing respondents with a predefined list of communities would improve classification and minimise the risk of the same caste being recorded under different names or spellings.

The Congress leader also criticised the Centre over the disclosure of information concerning corporate loan write-offs and wilful defaulters.

He alleged that public-sector institutions, including the Reserve Bank of India and Bank of Baroda, had declined to release the names of corporate borrowers who failed to repay loans despite a Supreme Court ruling in 2015.

Tagore claimed that only 28 per cent of the Rs 35,716 crore in written-off loans had been recovered.

Responding to the Left parties’ decision to contest the forthcoming by-elections independently, Tagore said he could not comment on their electoral strategy. He, however, expressed surprise that parties which had supported the government in the Assembly had decided to enter the contests separately.

With IANS inputs