Telangana govt ropes in Thomas Piketty to analyse caste census data

The Congress-led Telangana government has roped in French economist Thomas Piketty as a member of an 11-member expert committee to analyse and interpret the data collected during the recent caste census in the state. The expert group will submit its report to the Telangana government within a month.

 

The Telangana government’s planning department issued an order on Wednesday constituting an “independent expert working group” to “carry out” the “analysis” of the data from its Socio-Economic, Educational, Employment, Political and Caste (SEEEPC) Survey 2024, which was recently conducted. The analysis will help in the “formulation of evidence-based policies for various social sectors in the state,” a government order issued on Wednesday evening stated.

 

Justice (retired) Sudarshan Reddy will chair the 11-member group, with academician Kancha Ilaiah as its vice-chairman and Congress party’s data analytics and professionals’ Congress chairman Praveen Chakravarty as the expert group’s convenor.

 

Apart from Piketty, other members of the group are economist Jean Drèze, former University Grants Commission chairman Sukhadeo Thorat, academicians Shantha Sinha, Bhangya Bhukya, Purushotham Reddy and Himanshu, and activist Nikhil Dey.

 

Piketty, 53, is a professor of economics at the Paris School of Economics and the London School of Economics and is known for his work on income and wealth inequality. He is the author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, published in 2013, which studied the concentration and distribution of wealth over the last 250 years.

 

In February 2024, the Telangana cabinet had approved the decision to conduct the caste survey in the state, which was a key plank of the Congress for the December 2023 Telangana Assembly polls, which the party won.

 

The survey, which was conducted over 50 days from November 6, 2024, engaged 103,000 enumerators and 10,000 supervisors. The government has said 96.9 per cent of the state’s 37 million people were covered, while 3.1 per cent could not be covered either because of “door lock status” or because some did not wish to take part in the exercise.

 

The survey found that backward classes, including 10.08 per cent Muslims, account for 56.33 per cent of Telangana’s population of 37 million. According to the survey, 17.43 per cent, or 6.181 million, of Telangana’s population is Scheduled Castes, 10.45 per cent (3.70 million) Scheduled Tribes, and 15.79 per cent comprises ‘other castes’ (including 2.48 per cent Muslims). The total number of households in the state is 11,578,457, the caste census data revealed.