Even as the NITI Aayog is set to take on the onerous task of classifying data related to 4.6 million castes, it may face similar problem that Hutton and his team of two million enumerators faced around eight decades ago. Hutton faced this challenge at a time when the country's population was much lower at 353 million. Now there are as many households to collect data from. The fact that 330 million households belong to as many as 4.6 million caste groups (average of one caste for 72 households) seems to suggest that either enumerators erred in collecting data or respondents attached different meanings to the question they were asked. Caste, commonly understood as a collection of sub-castes and sub-sub-castes that follows the principle of endogamy, is believed to carry a common surname and is confined to a specific geographical region. The working definition has many exceptions though.
Experts say that data related to caste is hard to capture as it is a complex issue. The term caste carries multiple meanings for the respondents, depending on the context. At the micro level, an individual, for instance, might belong to a closed sub-caste of what is commonly referred to as the caste of Yadavs. But at the macro level, he might give a totally different name of the caste he belongs to. Depending on the situation, gotra is sometimes understood as an individual's caste. In some other context, surname denotes a caste. Closed endogamous group, too, connotes a caste. Some people residing in a common location and pursuing similar occupation, too, come to represent a caste. There are numerous such variations across states, say sociologists. No wonder, according to reports, caste data related to as many as 81 million households collected this time is suspected and needs to be verified now. The NITI Aayog might have a tough time ironing out those kinks.
Earlier census operations to capture caste data had faced similar problems. Writing about earlier caste censuses conducted in the pre-Independence days, Padmanabh Samarendra of New Delhi-based Jamia Millia Islamia has argued in a paper in the Economic and Political Weekly (EPW, August 2011) that "caste had a troubled presence in the pages of the census reports. No exhaustive list of castes could ever be prepared for any province, let alone for the country as a whole… No list was ever submitted without questions being asked whether those enlisted were really castes; no two reports on the census of India ever matched in the way these classified castes; no inventory of caste was ever compiled without the presiding census commissioner expressing misgivings about the whole project."