Leader of the Opposition Devendra Fadnavis misled the Maharashtra Assembly by claiming that the Socio-Economic Caste Census (SECC), 2011, had eight crore errors and 69 lakh were from the State alone, senior Congress leader and former chief minister Prithviraj Chavan said.
“The Lok Sabha Standing Committee on Rural Development, in its 27th report published in 2015-16, has clarified the matter and given the official statistics about the number of errors,” Mr. Chavan said. “The data has been examined and 98.87% of individuals’ caste and religion is error-free,” he said, quoting the report. He accused the BJP leader of deliberately misleading the House and the public.
The SECC, 2011, is a study of the socio-economic status of rural and urban households, and allows ranking of households based on predefined parameters. It has three components that were conducted by three separate authorities, but under the coordination of the Department of Rural Development in the Union government. The Census in rural areas has been conducted by the Department of Rural Development, while the Census in urban areas is under the administrative jurisdiction of the Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation. The caste Census is under the administrative control of the Registrar-General of India and Census Commissioner of India, Ministry of Home Affairs.
Speaking on the issue of political reservation for Other Backward Classes inside the State Assembly, Mr. Fadnavis had on July 5 said, “There are eight crore errors in the SECC, 2011 data and 69 lakh errors are from Maharashtra”.
The report stated that the population of socio-economic castes was 118,64,03,770, of which the incidence of errors noted was 1,34,77,030. This means that only 1.13% of the data had some errors.
The committee had asked the Ministry to rectify these errors with the States. A Claims and Objections Tracking System was then set up. Uttar Pradesh resolved 2,09,182 complaints (0.22% of population), while Rajasthan resolved 45,550 complaints using the system.