New Delhi: The much delayed population census, now underway, meant to enumerate India’s population, provide socio-economic indices for statistical analysis that can inform policy, has triggered allegations of being used to conduct a National Population Register (NPR)-like exercise, violating individual privacy and “sabotaging” by design the idea of counting caste for the first time. At the centre of the storm is a 40-point questionnaire that includes several new questions, that probe individual details like parents’ particulars, bank account details, Aadhaar, passport, Voter ID, place of Covid-19 vaccination, among others.While this is the first census since 1931 to enumerate caste, the question itself has been left open-ended, while leaving out Other Backward Classes (OBC) as a separate category. Together, this has raised troubling questions about not just the purpose for which the census is being conducted, but also whether the caste census promise is being deliberately defeated by design.The questionnaire at the centre of the stormOn August 14, the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India through the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) notified a set of 40 questions to be asked during the Population Enumeration phase. The questionnaire includes 11 additional questions against 29 that were a part of the 2011 Census-the last time India conducted a population count.The new questions include father and mother’s particulars, digital literacy status, permanent residential address, place of Covid-19 vaccination, total number of bank accounts, driving license availability. It also asks for passport, mobile, Aadhaar and voter ID numbers, if available.The new questions include permanent residential address, place of Covid-19 vaccination, total number of bank accounts, driving license availability. It also asks for passport, mobile, Aadhaar and voter ID numbers, if available. Photo: censusindia.gov.inIn addition, question number 10 which reads Scheduled Caste (SC)/ Scheduled Tribe (ST)/Caste, has become a flashpoint as it does not include a drop-down menu of caste names already available with the state, but instead provides for the enumerator to put down their caste names-opening the door to a vast plethora of caste names, like in the 2011 Socio-Economic and Caste Census that had a similar self enumeration and which threw up over 46 lakh entries.Why new questions on personal details triggered concerns of NPRThat the census questionnaire itself is seeking personal identification details has raised concerns that the government is using the census to update the NPR.“Census is for collecting information that will help in planning policy and other things. Now for this, passport number or any other numbers will not provide any clarity, neither will parents’ particulars, spouse’s names or other relationship details. My presumption is that these details will be used for updating the NPR or preparing it afresh,” said former deputy registrar general of India K. Narayanan Unni.The enumeration for the NPR can only be conducted under the provisions of the Citizenship (Registration of Citizens and Issue of National Identity Cards) Rules, 2003. Simply put, NPR is a list of “usual residents” in the country. The first NPR was conducted in 2010 and an updating of the register was done in 2015 through a door-to-door survey. In December 2019, the union government had cleared the way for updating the NPR then widely seen as a precursor process to the creation of the controversial National Register of Citizens (NRC) – and allocated a budget of Rs 3,941 crore for this task.The Indian Express had then reported that the NPR form required every resident to provide date and place of birth of parents, last place of residence, Permanent Account Number (PAN), Aadhaar (on a voluntary basis), voter ID card number, driving licence number and mobile number. However, the coronavirus pandemic put the exercise on hold, and also put a halt to anti-Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA)-NRC-NPR protests taking place across the country.Unni said that while in the NPR, the current address is an important aspect which is not part of the 40 questions in the Census 2027, why these other details are being sought is not clear.“For instance, Aadhaar and mobile numbers can be sought for identification but what purpose these other details are serving is not clear if not for NPR. Unlike the census which is conducted at the site, and does not include identification details, including even particulars like addresses, NPR requires accurate information and makes a legal record of a person unlike in a census. A person may be enumerated outside his present or permanent address, like a place where they are temporarily living like in a hostel or a hotel. The present address may be the place where other family members are, and collecting that is important. While asking many details required for the NPR, why this has been omitted is not clear.”Census is meant for collection of data, tabulation and classification analysis, that can identify socio-economic indices of the country, and can also inform policy decisions including identifying targets of government beneficiaries.“Individual details do not serve the census purpose because it cannot be tabulated or computed. Such numbers are only collected for individual verification as NPR,” said K.S. James, former director of the International Institute of Population Sciences (IIPS) and currently working with the Centre for Health and Wellbeing, Princeton University.Census and NPR data collection simultaneously also includes the risk of double counting.“The census is conducted at site, people know that the data is being used to see the overall socio-economic situation in the country and often provide information without hesitation. But NPR includes households providing information, including of different members who may be located at different places. This can give rise to serious double count and errors,” he said.Apart from the concerns of an NPR-like exercise being conducted through the census itself, the inclusion of individual information has also led to privacy concerns.The concerns of the census being used for the NPR also comes amid the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government’s pursuit of weeding out alleged illegal immigrants, targeting minorities through bureaucratic exercises like the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls, which Union home minister Amit Shah has defended in parliament as the government’s “detect, delete, deport” policy.The Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) has sent a representation to the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) and Registrar General of India (RGI) against the questions that point to a person’s identity, raising concerns that the census exercise essentially allows individual identifiable information to be linked to any major government database.“The Aadhaar number, Voter ID number, passport number and mobile number are individually identifiable information to the UIDAI database, the electoral rolls, passport records, telecom records and bank accounts. Now, if we use those identifiers in one household record, next to caste, religion, language and migration history, and you have built a way to join the census to every major government database. Hence, what is built is a population register, not a statistical exercise,” the IFF has said in a statement.The IFF has also said that since Section 8(2) of the Census Act makes every person “legally bound” to answer notified questions and Section 11(1)(d) makes refusal an offence, punishable with a fine, that the words “if available” have been provided next to the Aadhaar, mobile and Voter ID fields, does not explicitly state what happens if one refuses this information. Further the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, 2023 is not in force yet and its Rules that do cover statistical processing of personal data will only start on May 13 2027, after both phases of the census are over.Deliberately ‘sabotaged’ caste censusCrucially, the census is facing allegations of deliberately defeating the promise of a caste census.While there has been a political demand for the caste census for years, on April 30, 2025 the Union cabinet announced that a caste census will be conducted with the next population census. The announcement was a sharp reversal from the BJP’s stance in the 2024 Lok Sabha election campaign the year before, where it had described the caste census as a move to divide society, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi calling it a sign of the “urban Naxal” thinking of opposition parties.The Census 2027 questionnaire, provides for enumerating SC/ ST/Caste, leaving out OBC. The Hindu has reported that the enumerator will record the caste as declared by the respondent as it is an open column.It does not include a drop-down menu that has raised questions about the kind of data that the census will capture.“It appears to be a sabotaged caste census, asking an open-ended question without a drop-down list is an invitation for proliferation of caste names including variations in spellings which will make the data almost certainly unusable,” said sociologist Satish Deshpande.“In any case, well over 90% of the results in census-like surveys that have been done in Bihar and Karnataka have followed the known caste names for which there exists a dropdown list, at least for SC/ST and OBC. In most states there are both central and state level certified lists of recognised castes, so the vast majority of people will fall in these categories. Not taking advantage of this is, not just foolish, but it appears to be too obvious in being ignored, and therefore one can only conclude that it is being done deliberately.”On Tuesday (August 25), leaders of opposition in the Rajya Sabha and Lok Sabha, Mallikarjun Kharge and Rahul Gandhi wrote to prime minister Narendra Modi and said that the existing questionnaire be scrapped, as the open ended question on caste will impact decisions related to education, employment, welfare schemes and social justice.“We do not accept the caste census being conducted in the current manner. The government should scrap the existing questionnaire and formulate a new one after consulting political parties, experts and the general public; this would ensure that the true numbers of every caste and community are revealed, making the caste census accurate, meaningful and beneficial,” the Congress leaders’ letter said.While there has been no caste census since 1931, in 2011 the Union cabinet decided to conduct the Socio Economic and Caste Census (SECC) wherein the caste of the household along with social-economic status on the identified parameters was directed to be collected.In 2021 the union government in an affidavit told the Supreme Court that the caste data from 2011 has not been disclosed and has been kept with the Office of the Registrar General, India (ORGI) for various reasons, but primarily for the “technical flaws” that were noticed in the raw caste/tribe SECC data which makes it unusable.The exercise found 46 lakh categories of caste and sub-castes, and different caste and clan surnames. Citing the Union government’s affidavit, Congress MP Jairam Ramesh said that while the government had then said in court that a drop-down menu would have aided in making consistent data available, it has chosen to not do so in the 2027 census, calling it a “u-turn.”In its 2021 affidavit, the Union government also said enumeration of OBCs/BCCs (Backward Class of Citizens) has always been found to be administratively extremely complex and even when census of castes were taken in the pre-independence period, the data suffered in respect of completeness and accuracy.Experts bat for scientific questionnaireHowever, experts said that the problem, while complex and challenging, can be solved by a scientific questionnaire.“A questionnaire can be scientifically designed. Perhaps an option can be to have a hierarchical drop-down under each main category of SC, ST, OBC along with the known names available with the centre and the states under each category, along with that there can also be the option of the individual writing it down separately,” said James.“This can make tabulation easy. Since only SC/ST have been counted since 1961, it is useful to have the information of the proportion of the population in each category. It is also important to include OBCs because they have never been counted before, and as OBC reservations exist in several states for panchayat and local body elections, the census data has to be the majority source for that as well.”Deshpande said that while the exclusion of OBC as a category is inexplicable, the refusal to learn from the 2011 experience shows that the union government’s moves are to make the data generated through the census essentially unusable.“What is happening now appears to be quite considered and in that sense should not be considered an error but a strategy through which it appears that a caste census is conducted but creates a self-fulfilling prophecy of the data being extremely unwieldy and unusable,” he said.