Counting has always been a political exercise, never a neutral one. India is counting all castes for the first time in the caste census since Independence, but the design is flawed, bound to create chaos and needs to be reviewed. The state decides who’s to be seen clearly and who’s to be made invisible. The OBC or Other Backward Classes are given a blank space in the census questionnaire 2027, which they must fill with the community they belong to. This has been their fate since 1951. But this actually ensure that they are not counted. Without usable data, they are excluded from governance. Here is how this transpires.The Census Questionnaire 2027, which has been rolled out, asks 40 questions, and question 10 concerns caste. Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes have a fixed list of recognised communities under Articles 341 and 342. For others, including OBCs, a blank field is provided to manually enter their caste. The problem is that ‘OBC’ is not a caste but a category which has thousands of castes that need to be later matched to the OBC list. The two central departments already had disagreements over the use of the OBC list, so assuming that reconciling millions of entries later will be fruitful is highly unlikely. This risks translating answers into usable numbers.The government had admitted in a 2021 affidavit to the Supreme Court that using caste-coded lists was an ideal option. India has already witnessed what happens if it doesn’t use one. The 2011 Socio-economic caste census used an open-ended questionnaire and recorded 46,73,034 distinct caste names, with 8.19 crore errors; 1.45 crore of them remain unresolved today, more than a decade later. The Cabinet set up an expert committee under the chairmanship of Aravind Pangariya to bring some order to the chaos. But the committee report had never really been out. In 2022, the Indian government acknowledged that it had not counted caste, except for SC and ST, since Independence.Political scientist James C. Scott frames this problem in terms of state legibility. He reminds us that the state sees itself through categories that make themselves legible. SCs and STs are recognised in the census, as it provides a list for the two groups respectively. OBCs remain illegible: it governs them through certificates and reservations, but has never bothered to build a system to count them. Philosopher Axel Honneth sharpens this point by reminding us that the state recognises in two forms: rights and visibility. India has given the first and withheld the second. Political theorist Patchen Markell refines this argument further by framing the very process of recognition as a tool of control and power, in which the authority holds the power to decide who or what is recognisable and what is not.All this is no accident. Government officials have agreed that the July test run in 16 states might reproduce the same errors. Repeating a design which is bound to fail is a choice made about who is worth counting properly and who is not.This decision is now facing resistance from backward classes and other opposition parties. On September 8, the Tamil Nadu Assembly passed a resolution requesting the Union government use the official OBC caste lists rather than an open-ended column. On September 11, the Telangana assembly followed suit, demanding that the centre record OBCs in Question 10 along with SC and ST. OBC groups, including the BC Intellectual Forum and the All India OBC Students Association, have been demanding that the Census create a separate OBC column in the dropdown menu and use coded lists for all caste groups, including OBCs’, assigning a single code to each caste to prevent errors, spelling variations, and fragmentation, and that the Census should be halted until a consensus is reached. The solution isn’t new. In its own 2021 affidavit to the Supreme Court, the union government had said that a coded system would have been ideal. But 14 years later, the design remains unchanged.The consequences of this flawed design haven’t been limited to technicalities but have been deciding the fate of OBC reservations in the courts for a long time now. In the famous Indra Sawhney v Union of India (1992) case, the Supreme Court held that Article 16(4) talks about adequate representation, which doesn’t mean proportional representation, and confirmed the cap of 50% again, which was earlier drawn by the same Supreme Court in M.R. Balaji v. State of Mysore (1963). It can only be crossed by producing solid data collected by the census, as only figures have the required legitimacy. The Mandal Commission also had to suggest a 27% reservation for OBCs, as they could not cross this cap. The Bihar government had provided 65% reservation to OBCs based on its own survey findings which indicated a 63% OBC population. But the Patna high court struck down the quota on the aforementioned grounds. The Telangana government’s 42% quota also faced the same pushback from the high court and the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court in Jaishri Laxmanrao Patil v. State of Maharashtra (2021) dismissed the Gaikwad commission’s survey as an unscientific exercise. All these developments indicate that states cannot cross the cap on their own. Only the National Census holds legitimacy for the national population count under Entry 69 of the Union List, which is administered by the Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner, India, under the Ministry of Home Affairs.Ambedkar, in his famous speech, on January 26, 1950, said that “we are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In politics, we will have equality, and in social and economic life, we will have inequality.” The whole OBC question is moving toward the social and economic equality that Dr Ambedkar envisioned. The census doesn’t automatically dissolve inequalities, but it is a great step towards that goal. Census can make OBCs visible to the nation, the state, policy, welfare measures, and the budget. We have been looking away from OBCs even as we depend on them for the very survival of this nation. We have counted them as electoral blocs but not as people. The census exercise with a caste-coded OBC category would build a system for this recognition. This is a long-overdue process; OBCs have waited for it for 90 years, and we cannot make them wait any longer if we are really concerned about seeing ourselves as an egalitarian democracy. OBCs are not the footnote of India’s story.Sai Ganesh Akarapu is a researcher whose work engages political and sociological theory to examine caste, labour, and representation, with a particular focus on the structural exclusion of OBC and MBC communities. His research is shaped by his OBC background and grounded in enduring concerns of justice, dignity, and recognition.