TNNChennai: Tamil Nadu Legislative Assembly on Tuesday adopted a resolution urging Union govt to scrap the “open column” method for recording caste details in the upcoming Census and instead provide a pre-loaded, standardised list of officially notified castes.The resolution has been passed days after former chief minister M K Stalin demanded that the assembly adopt such a resolution to protect the rights of OBCs. However, DMK members were not present when the resolution was tabled as they were evicted from the House. The resolution was adopted unanimously by the members of AIADMK, PMK, VCK, Congress and BJP who were present.Moving the resolution, backward classes welfare minister V Sampath Kumar, urged that a drop-down list of castes notified by state and union govts should be provided for the public to choose from during phase 2 of the 2027 Census. It said the open-entry method, which allows individuals to manually enter caste names, could lead to ambiguity and affect the quality and usability of data.Participating in the debate, former minister and AIADMK MLA C Ve Shanmugam cited the experience of the 2011 Socio-Economic and Caste Census and warned that repeating the open-entry exercise would create administrative chaos.He said official enumerations before 1931 had recorded around 4,147 caste names across the country. However, when the 2011 exercise allowed open-ended self-reporting, the number of caste names grew to 46.7 lakh.“If the open column method is followed in the census, the number of caste names could easily cross one crore,” Shanmugam said.Shanmugam also cautioned against attempts to blur the distinction between caste and class in official documentation. He pointed out that Other Backward Classes represented a social category comprising several individual communities and could not be treated as a single caste. In Tamil Nadu alone, he said, 262 communities were covered under the OBC category.PMK MLA Ganeshkumar echoed similar concerns and backed the demand for a standardised list.
