A three-member expert committee constituted by the A Revanth Reddy-led Telangana government to study the state’s caste enumeration exercise would measure relative backwardness of different castes on a scale of zero to 126 on 42 parameters.
The Telangana Social Educational Employment Economic Caste Survey (2024) classified 243 castes in the state. This year, the Revanth Reddy government set up a nine member committee comprising former Supreme Court Justice Sudarshan Reddy (chairman), writer and academic Kancha Ilaiah (vice chairman) and Congress leader Praveen Chakravarthy (member convener) to study the caste survey data and come up with a way of measuring the backwardness of different castes.
Chakravarty, who is also the chairman of the Professionals’ Congress, told The Indian Express that this is the first time in the country that “a measure of backwardness is being done based on a wide variety of parameters”.
The 42 parameters being used to measure backwardness of different castes include social circumstances, educational background, living standards, occupation, income, movable and immovable assets, and access to banking and finance.
The parameters were designed on the basis of the Mandal Commission Report of 1980, which had used 11 parameters to compute relative backwardness.
The Telangana panel’s backwardness index has 17 points as positive indicators of development. These including inter-caste marriages, robust gender ratio, educational qualifications including diploma and above, private school education, English medium school education, government and private job profile, ownership of medium or large business, immigration to other countries for work, annual income of Rs 5 to 50 lakh, income tax payment, land holding of irrigated land or land between five to 20 acres, and households having a car and a fridge.
As per this, households which have an annual income between Rs 5 and 50 lakh and own large tracts of land, for example, would get a smaller score on the measure of backwardness.
On the other hand, those with annual income less than Rs 1 lakh or those who hold less than five acres of land will get a higher score of backwardness.
The panel’s negative indicators of backwardness include discrimination at places of worship, child marriage, women who have education below Class X, high school dropout rate, illiteracy, daily wage work, child labour, NREGA work, informal sector employment, no toilet, tap water and electricity.
The Telangana caste survey had covered 3.55 crore people and collected information about 75 fields, including “social, economic. educational, identity, occupational and living aspects of their daily lives.
Of the 243 caste groups identified in the survey, 73 sub-castes constitute 96% of the population of Telangana. These include 10 sub-castes of Scheduled Castes (SCs), seven sub-castes of Scheduled Tribes (STs), 45 sub-castes of Backward Classes (BCs), and 11 sub-castes of Other Castes.
