The announcement that caste data will finally be included in India’s national census has provoked the predictable alarm. Critics say it will entrench divisions, reward identity politics, and set back the long project of building a post-caste republic.
They are wrong. And the confidence with which they advance this argument is itself a symptom of the problem.
Data Is Not Division
For seventy-seven years, India has governed caste inequality without a reliable national map of what that inequality actually looks like. We have reservation policies that predate independence, but no current data on whether those policies are working, who is benefiting, or where the gaps remain most acute.
To argue that measuring a problem will create the problem is a logic that would paralyse all of medicine. We do not avoid cancer screening because we fear the diagnosis.
The 2011 SECC exercise, for all its methodological flaws, revealed a country that policymakers had consistently underestimated in its depth of structural disadvantage. A properly conducted caste census will do the same — and this time, we should be ready to act on what it finds.