For the first time in Independent India, enumeration of  OBCs  will be included in the census exercise. The Congress-led UPA, under pressure from various political parties representing  OBC interests, gave in to their demand for census enumeration on May 7.
 
A day after the issue was discussed in the Lok Sabha for over four hours, the government agreed to include OBC enumeration, in the census 2011 exercise that started on April 1, 2010.

Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee explained: “It (Census 2011 exercise) has just started. All we need to do is to include a column on OBC. There are already columns on general, scheduled castes and scheduled tribes.”

So far, there have been only two attempts to enumerate OBCs- - one in 1901 and another in 1931. However, there has been no such exercise in Independent India, as it was feared that it would divide the country further on caste lines

There have been other objections, such as difficulty in ascertaining OBC status, but the government agreed to go by wider political consensus on the issue.

Home Minister P Chidambaram in a note prepared for Cabinet had expressed concerns over “reverse Sanskritisation” taking place, in order to seek the benefits of reservation. There will be a rush to enter the other backward classes (OBC) bracket, he said. As enumerators will have no means to verify claims, there are fears that OBC figures will be grossly inflated. The note said that such a census could result in “motivated returns through organised and surreptitious means to project higher numbers of a particular caste”.

The minister was also opposed to it for logistical reasons. In his statement in the Lok Sabha, Chidambaram had argued that the census exercise had already been started and it would be difficult at this stage to bring caste into the picture.

At present, house-listing exercise is taking place for Census 2011. The social profiling will begin six months from now when OBC status will be included. However, the home ministry is sceptical about the outcome of such a hurried data collation. “The enumerator is not an investigator or verifier,” Chidambaram said, adding that 21 lakh enumerators — mostly primary school teachers — had no training or expertise to classify the answer as OBC or otherwise.

There is a central list of OBCs and there are state-specific lists of OBCs. Some states do not have a list of OBCs; some states have a list of OBCs and a subset called most backward classes.

Quoting the Registrar General, the home minister said issues regarding methodology, avoiding phonetic and spelling errors, stage of canvassing of caste, maintaining integrity of enumeration and doing an accurate headcount of population will arise.