Caste Census Goes Hi-Tech

Bangalore: The course of carrying out a caste-based census kicked off in the capital on Monday. The Socio-Economic and Caste Census will commence from April 10 in Kerala and will be a paperless hi-tech affair for the first time. The Union government is sanctioning 20,000 tablet PCs to record the details collected from households across the state.

The 20,000 enumerators visiting houses in the state will be accompanied by an equal number of data entry operators trained by the Indian Telephone Industries, Palakkad, who will enter the details about the members of each household.

The tablet PCs are supplied by PSUs like Electronics Cor-poration of India Limited (ECIL) and BHEL. The batteries of the PCs, once charged, will last for about eight hours and the PCs will have a memory card in order to secure the data.

The details collected every day will be entered each day on the server set up at the offices of municipal corporations and at the level of the block panchayat. There will be provisions for recording, deletion, addition, etc, from the National Population Register and also any migration of members of households to other places. The collected data then would be submitted to the Union Ministry for Rural Development and the Directorate of Census Operations.

According to officials, there will be a provision for entering the transgender sex in the new pattern and also for stating that a person is not interested in registering his/her caste. There will further be a provision to register serious diseases, but if people want confidentiality, it will be kept. The census exercise will also include the collection of data of those who lead a nomadic life.

This is the first time after 1931 that information on a person’s caste is being taken in the Socio-Economic and Caste Census. In the current census, officers at various levels will make sure that there is no misreporting through special scrutiny at the grama-sabha level after the census.

The census exercise is being led by the Union Ministry for Rural Development, Union Ministry for Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation, Registrar General of India, National Informatics Centre and Bharat Electronics Limited.