While Telangana is making history, Centre ‘failed’ to host population census: Congress

PTI New Delhi: Hailing the cast survey underway in Telangana, the Congress on Friday said what the state government has achieved is all the more impressive when it is considered that the Centre has “failed” to host the decadal population census that was due in 2021 Congress general secretary in-charge communications Jairam Ramesh said while Telangana is making history, the Union government has failed to honour a tradition that every government since Independence has upheld.

“A caste survey is not just a revolutionary step towards social justice, it is also an exercise that requires tremendous administrative competence. It is a mammoth task: in Telangana, it will involve 80,000 enumerators surveying 1.17 crore households across 33 districts,” Ramesh said on X. To survey each and every family amidst the diversity of cultures, landscapes, and economies requires the government to work in mission mode, right from the village and ward level to the CMO, he said. “Some glimpses of this exercise in Nalgonda district, where over 55% of the population has already been surveyed. In Miryalguda Municipality, officers have developed a GIS map of all 288 enumeration blocks, spread across 44 wards. This technology is bound to enable the Municipality to better plan for municipal services in the future,” he said. To ensure confidentiality of the filled-out schedules, officers in Nalgonda District have also procured cast-iron trunks to store them securely, he pointed out.

The integrity of the Caste Survey parallels that of the election process, Ramesh stressed. “What the Government of Telangana has achieved under the leadership of Chief Minister A Revanth Reddy and Deputy Chief Minister Bhatti Vikramarka Mallu is all the more impressive when we consider that the Union Government has failed to host the decadal population census that was due in 2021,” he said. The Congress last week asserted that a nationwide caste survey and the lifting of the Supreme Court’s “arbitrary ceiling” of 50 per cent on reservations for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and Other Backward Classes are central to its vision for the country.