The Karnataka government is all set to undertake the second Socio and Educational Survey between September 22 and October 7. With only two days left for the launch of the exercise, the Siddaramaiah-led Congress government appears to be going full steam ahead without having made any serious effort to correct some of the major misconceptions that plagued the 2015 survey.
The biggest misconception about the survey, currently as well as in 2015, is that various groups of people, including politicians and community leaders, think that the state government is out to do a caste-based population headcount. The Congress government has made little attempt to explain clearly to people that the datasets of populations of individual castes are a byproduct of the survey’s purpose of measuring caste-based social, educational and economic backwardness. This leaves the state government open to the same criticism levelled at the 2015 survey by caste groups—without a shred of proof—that it was “unscientific” because it had “undercounted” various communities.