Caste Census: All the opposition parties including Samajwadi Party President Akhilesh Yadav have been raising the demand for conducting caste census. Even though BJP has not openly supported it, it has not been against it either and now the Modi government at the center has started brainstorming on caste census. The biggest challenge before the government is how to conduct caste census?

Earlier in 2011, caste census was conducted in UP Government-2, but the situation was not clear at that time. In such a situation, the government can talk to the opposition parties for caste census. It is believed that an all-party meeting can also be called for this. So that some accurate formula can be prepared for the separate identification of castes across the country. But till now there is no such formula through which the identification of castes can be clearly calculated. 

It is difficult to decide the formula of caste census.
During the caste census conducted in 2011, an attempt was made to collect the data of social, economic and caste census of the people. In this, people were given the opportunity to declare their caste. During this census, people declared their castes and according to that, there were more than 46.80 lakh castes in 2011. In such a situation, it became very difficult to find out how many castes are OBC or come under other categories. Due to which the data of this caste census was not made public. 

For some time now, the opposition has once again started sharpening the issue of caste census. All political parties including SP, Congress are seen uniting on this issue. After which the government is considering taking further steps in this direction. But the biggest problem is that no proper formula is being decided for its calculation. If castes are identified on the basis of surname, then the biggest problem in this is that the surnames of many people also increase confusion. Some people keep the surname of their village, father or other types. In such a situation also it is difficult to calculate the caste correctly. 

One option is to give people the opportunity to declare their caste themselves. But this can lead to a large number of people trying to declare themselves as OBCs in order to take advantage of the benefits given to the OBC category. This can create more problems.