Alrighty, so like, for a while now, Rahul Gandhi has been blabbering about this Socio-Economic and Caste Census (SECC) thing that the UPA-2 government did back in the day. He kept on yapping about it until Prime Minister Narendra Modi suddenly decided to include caste enumeration in the upcoming census. Rahul Gandhi, being the loud opposition dude he is, kept saying how the ruling BJP was scared of releasing the SECC findings.
Then, on Wednesday, Congress leader Jairam Ramesh brought up a letter from Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge to PM Modi from way back in April 2023. In this letter, Kharge was demanding an updated Caste Census. Ramesh even shared the letter on X, showing how the Congress has been pushing for this for a while now.
The UPA-2 government finished the SECC enumeration back in 2012, and by 2013, they had all the data ready to go. But because there were elections coming up in 2014, they decided to keep it under wraps. Sneaky, right? The current NDA government didn’t release the data either, claiming it wasn’t finalized. But who knows what the real deal is, am I right?
In September 2021, the government straight up said they weren’t gonna do a caste census that year. Like, why even bother dragging it out if you’re not gonna go through with it, you know? The UPA government had presented the SECC in 2011 to the Parliamentary Consultative Committee for the Ministry of Rural Development. They were all about that presentation life, man.
The SECC had some elements to it, like the methodology which involved classifying rural households in three steps and involving various stakeholders like the Ministry of Rural Development and the Office of Registrar General of India. It was a whole process with stages like enumeration, supervision, verification, and more. But hey, in the end, it seems like the caste data just got passed around to different departments without any real action.
So yeah, the whole saga of the SECC and the demand for a caste census has been going on for years now. The Congress has been pushing for it, the BJP has been avoiding it, and here we are, still waiting for some real answers. Who knows if we’ll ever get to see that data or if it’ll just keep gathering dust in some government office. It’s a real head-scratcher, isn’t it?
But hey, that’s politics for you. Always some drama, some promises, and a whole lot of waiting around for things to actually happen. Let’s see where this whole caste census thing goes next. Maybe one day we’ll finally get some concrete answers. Or maybe we’ll just keep on waiting. Time will tell, my friends. Time will tell.
