The Centre Government said that it has begun the exercise to conduct the census and an announcement about the same is expected soon. It indicated that it had an “open mind” on adding the caste column in the decennial enumeration, reported TOI. The process has been delayed since the Covid-19 outbreak.
“Work on holding the census is already on and a decision in this regard is likely soon,” a senior government functionary told TOI on the condition of anonymity.
The call for a census has become strong and several opposition parties and a few BJP allies have been demanding a caste count. The RSS has said it had no problem with the exercise as long as the findings were used for welfare schemes, and not for “politics”.
The organisation said one nation-one election, a key manifesto of BJP, would be implemented during the Modi 3.0 tenure.
Rollout of women’s quota, enacted last year, tied to census
A senior government official said that modalities of holing state assembly elections along with the Lok Sabha polls were being worked out. “Definitely, one nation-one election will be implemented in this tenure itself. It will be a reality.”
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in his Independence Day speech, made a strong pitch for one nation-one election, arguing that frequent polls were creating hurdles in the country’s progress.
The government official also said groundwork for holding the census has begun. This is the first time that the government has confirmed the likelihood of a census being conducted soon, as well as the possibility of including caste in the process. “This (caste count) is yet to be decided,” the functionary said.
The census with a caste column was last conducted in 1931. The government dropped the column post independence. The first phase of this decade’s census was expected to begin on April 1, 2020 but had to be postponed due to Covid-19. Implementation of the Women’s Reservation Act, enacted by Parliament last year, too is linked to the census.
The law reserving one-third seats for women in the Lok Sabha will be implemented after an exercise of delimitation is undertaken based on the first census recorded after the Act came into force.
The functionary said the government is confident that its legislative agenda will be passed and it was naive to say the government was soft and that there was pressure from allies. He said that tough decisions like waqf board reforms, have been initiated to bring transparency, which was a “blow to the politics of appeasement”.
This census is set to become the first digital one with citizens having the opportunity to self-enumerate. NPR has been made compulsory for citizens who want to exercise the right to fill the census form on their own rather than through government enumerators.