Abstract:-

Conflicts over access to higher education and public sector employment have intensified amidst the lackluster job growth in the country’s formal sector. These conflicts often involve demands for redesigning affirmative action. The success of the next generation of affirmative action policies will critically depend upon, among other things, the quality of underlying statistics. This talk will assess the quality of census data on Scheduled Castes especially in relation to the demands for their sub-categorization. It will also locate the quality of data on caste in the larger context of coverage and content errors in censuses held after India’s independence. It will conclude with suggestions for improving data quality and preparing the census to handle demands for enumerating the caste of the entire population.