Seminar by Vikas Kumar (Azim Premji University)

Conflicts over access to higher education and public sector employment are growing amidst the lackluster growth of the formal sector of the economy even as literacy levels are rising. These conflicts often involve demands for sub-categorisation within the castes and tribes entitled to affirmative action benefits. Attempts in this regard have met with pushback in the absence of suitable evidence. This talk will use these developments as the point of departure and assess the quality of Indian census from the perspective of content errors. It will examine content errors in data on tribes, languages and castes from states such as Jammu and Kashmir, Ladakh, Manipur, Maharashtra, Nagaland, Punjab, Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh and comment on the capacity of the Indian census to support the next generation of affirmative action policies.