New Delhi: The Patna high court on Tuesday (August 1) upheld the caste survey being carried out by the Nitish Kumar government in Bihar, by dismissing petitions filed against it.A bench of Chief Justice K. Vinod Chandran and Justice Partha Sarthy delivered its on five petitions challenging the survey. On July 7, the court had reserved its order on the matter.The Nitish Kumar government had launched a caste census in Bihar in January this year, and said that detailed information on socio-economic conditions would help create better government policy to aid disadvantaged groups. The entire exercise was supposed to have been completed by May. However, the legal challenges meant the government was unable to complete the exercise.On May 4, the Patna high court put a stay on the caste census, saying, “Prima facie, we are of the opinion that the State has no power to carry out a caste-based survey, in the manner in which it is fashioned now, which would amount to a census, thus impinging upon the legislative power of the Union Parliament.”On May 18, the Supreme Court refused to lift the high court’s stay.The caste census has become a major political concern in recent months, with opposition parties amping up the pressure on the Union government to do the exercise on a national basis. It was the Congress-led UPA government which first conducted a Socio-Economic and Caste Census (SECC) in 2011-12 but never released its data because of varied opinions about it within the government.As The Wire has reported, the demand for a caste census was more vocally expressed by different opposition parties after the Narendra Modi government implemented reservation for the Economically Weaker Classes (EWS), which effectively gave a quota to the so-called “upper caste” groups. The EWS reservation was seen as an anomaly in the caste-based affirmative action policy because the criteria was poverty, and was perceived by various parties as a move to deny marginalised castes and communities their rights.