Patna: As soon as the coalition government of Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and Janata Dal United (JDU) was formed in Bihar, CM Nitish Kumar had agreed to conduct a caste census. Now from Saturday (January 7), the work has also started in Bihar regarding this. Since the time RJD was in opposition, they had been demanding a caste census.
Rs 500 crore will be spent on Nitish Kumar's controversial caste-based census. The state government will complete this census in two phases. The first phase will be done from January 7 to January 21. During this, all the houses in the state will also be counted. Its second phase will be started in March. During this, data related to people of all castes, sub-castes, and religions will be collected. During this, the counting staff will also record the information about the economic status of all those people.
In this 8-tier survey from Panchayat to the District level, data will be collected digitally through a mobile application. In this app, there will be questions about the place, caste, number of people in the family, their profession, and annual income. People covered in the census include teachers, Anganwadi workers, MNREGA, or livelihood workers. The Nitish government had made arrangements to train these people from December 15, 2022, to complete the tasks related to the census.
Let us inform you that since independence till now, the census has been done in the country a total of 7 times. In all these, only the Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST) figures were published. However, data for each caste and religion has been collected in this census every ten years, but not released. In such a situation, the Bihar government especially wants to know the figures of Other Backward Classes (OBC).
What is the benefit of caste census to Nitish-Tejashwi:-
In fact, the Bihar government says that it will use this data to formulate public utility policies. But, if we look at the politics of RJD and JDU, the politics of both parties depend on the OBC vote bank. While Ahirs are the main vote bank for Lalu Yadav's party, Nitish Kumar has the support of Kurmi voters. In such a situation, if the correct figures of OBC come in front of them, then both these parties will definitely get help in setting their political quotas. At the same time, there is also a flaw in this policy of the Bihar government that, in this, the government has not laid any solid basis to identify illegal infiltrators, Bangladeshis, and Rohingyas. Perhaps this too has been done keeping in view the vote bank. Because both RJD and JDU also get a sizeable amount of Muslim votes, no one would want to anger Muslims by alienating Rohingyas and Bangladeshis.
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