Data from caste surveys should be made public, says apex court

Data from caste surveys should be made public to let people mount legal challenges to the decisions taken by the governments based on such data, the Supreme Court observed on Tuesday.

- Utkarsh Anand

It also sought to know from the Bihar government the extent to which it put out the data of its 2023 caste survey since this became the basis for hiking the caste-based quota from 50 to 65% in employment and education in the state.

Apart from the impending legal issues, the survey in Bihar has deepened political battle lines around caste ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections and the 2025 assembly elections in Bihar as the national Opposition aims to dent the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) wider Hindu consolidation by alluding to the interests of different communities in a complicated caste matrix.

"What we are concerned about is that the breakdown of data is normally not made available to the public and that creates problems since data become the basis of inferences," said a bench of justices Sanjiv Khanna and Dipankar Datta as it heard a bunch of petitions challenging the August 1 judgment of the Patna high court that allowed the state government to carry out the caste survey.

According to the bench, it is important for the authorities to put out the data of the caste survey in the public domain because selective disclosure may not be enough for the people to pursue the appropriate legal recourse available to them.