New Delhi: Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh on Monday (June 10) said that nearly 14 crore people have been left out under the National Food Security Act (NFSA) as the list of beneficiaries is based on outdated figures from the 2011 census.
Slamming Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the fallouts of not conducting the census exercise, due in 2021, Ramesh said that Modi has to tell the country when the census will be updated.
The population enumeration exercise got postponed indefinitely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This is the first time in its 150-year history that the decennial census has been delayed.
In his post on X, Ramesh also demanded that information on the population of Other Backward Classes (OBC) should be included in the census to give “true” meaning to social justice enshrined in the Constitution. “The decennial Census has since 1951 provided data on population of scheduled castes and scheduled tribes. The updated Census must provide data on the population of communities categorised as OBCs as well,” he said, adding that a comprehensive census is essential for socio-economic development.
Conducting a caste census was a core campaign issue for the Congress during the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
In a subsequent post on X, Ramesh said, “The government cannot plan for social justice without data on the population in each of these categories [SC/ST/OBC]. That is why a caste census becomes necessary. It is also essential in order to ensure more equitable distribution of reservation benefits within the reserved categories.”
He also pointed out that a caste census would allow “ [us to] answer who benefits from fast economic development, and who bears its costs. Our experience shows that the benefits of growth in India are inequitably distributed.”
Fallouts of a delayed census
The lack of updated census data has delayed at least 15 other vital data sets related to health, demography and economy, in addition to affecting the quality of surveys by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO), the Deccan Herald reported
Other than food security, the lack of census data has also the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) as the Union government is meant to allocate funds to each state based on the number of households and labourers in the state.
State governments are also struggling to allocate funds for various schemes aimed at the development of SC/ST communities, old-age pension, and housing for the poor due to the absence of updated figures.
Under pressure to ensure that eligible beneficiaries are not left out of welfare schemes, state governments have been forced to spend money to generate their own data sets
“In a country like India, census data is very crucial as it helps understand the changes in demographic profile, sex ratio, migration, economic diversification of households and extent of urbanisation, among other things. Also, it is the census data that forms the basis or the frame for any sample survey to estimate poverty and inequality,” professor M. Vijayabaskar of the Madras Institute of Development Studies, told Deccan Herald.
