Caste, and not class, will be taken into consideration during the exhaustive count of the population of the country that will be held in 2026-2027, sources said on Thursday.
Each person will have to mention their caste and religion for the 16th Census that will be conducted in two phases in 2027.
"Along with religion, everyone will have to declare their caste, irrespective of whether one is from the general category, OBC or Scheduled Caste or Scheduled Tribe category," a source said.
Explaining the need to specify the caste, rather than class, the source said there is no unified or single list for Other Backward Classes (OBCs), unlike the Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs).
"The OBC list varies from state to state and that from the Centre," the source said.
Two separate lists of OBCs are maintained - the central list is maintained by the National Commission for Backward Classes and used for reference in providing reservations in central government jobs and educational institutes; the state lists are managed by the respective governments and are often longer and more extensive than the central list.
On Wednesday, the Union Home Ministry announced that India's 16th Census with caste enumeration will be carried out in 2027 with the reference date of October 1, 2026 in snow-bound areas like Ladakh and of March 1, 2027 in the rest of the country.
The Census is being carried out after a gap of 16 years as the last one was held in 2011. More than 30 lakh enumerators and their supervisors are likely to be engaged to carry out the mega exercise.
It will also be the first digital Census giving the citizens an opportunity to self-enumerate.
The population of the country as per the Census 2011 was 1210.19 million of which 623.72 million (51.54 per cent) were males and 586.46 million (48.46 per cent) were females.
