The state government has finally decided to conduct a caste census in Bihar at its own expense days after the Narendra Modi government at the Centre ruled out any such proposal. Now, a formal proposal will be brought before the state cabinet to this effect.

Chief Minister Nitish Kumar gave a go-ahead to the caste census plan to identify various deprived groups in the state after holding a meeting with the representatives of various political parties in the state. At the meeting, a general consensus emerged on the issue.

Emerging from the all-party meeting, the chief minister told the media persons, “We have decided to hold a caste census after formal consent of all political parties. Now, a proposal will be sent to the state Cabinet for approval.”

The main objective of the move, he said is to let every caste/community come on board and that none should feel neglected.

The chief minister said his government’s next target is to arrange for funds and train the staff to be engaged in the headcounts of various caste groups. He hoped the entire exercise would go a long way in ensuring proper counting of all castes and sub-castes from all the communities.

The state government was prompted to take this step after the Centre didn’t show any interest in its request for caste census even after an all-party delegation took up the issue with the Prime Minister when called on him last year.  Significantly, the state assembly had unanimously passed a resolution for conducting the caste census twice.

Last September, the Centre made it clear in the Supreme Court that a caste census of the Backward Classes is “administratively difficult and cumbersome”.

“The issue has been examined at length in the past at different points of time. Each time, the view has consistently been that the caste Census of Backward Classes is administratively difficult and cumbersome; it has suffered and will suffer both on account of completeness and accuracy of the data, as also evident from the infirmities of the SECC 2011 data, making it unusable for any official purposes and cannot be mentioned as a source of information for population data in any official document,” was how the affidavit filed by the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment said.