The mammoth census exercise has just begun with the count of households, to be followed by the count of an estimated 1.2 billion people. As it happened just before the census in recent decades, several groups have demanded that data on backward castes should be collected. Government officials, including Home Secretary GK Pillai, have said there is no plan to change the practice – the last caste census was done way back in 1931.

However, a PIL has come up before the Supreme Court and a bench of Chief Justice KG Balakrishnan has asked the government to clarify its stance about collecting OBC data in particular.

Which reminds us that the country does not have an official database on the OBC population even as more and more reservation and quotas have been carved out for them. During UPA I, when the reservation for OBCs in higher education was debated the court had noted that there was no data on OBC population to arrive at a proportionate quota figure. Having such a set of data can only help in policy formulation. And the last census, in 2001, did collect data on SC/ST. So, should not the data on OBCs be collected during Census 2010?