The opposition leader and the leader of the Congress, Rahul Gandhi, went to a press conference at the AICC office in New Delhi on Wednesday | Photo credit: Shashi Shekhar Kashyap
The center must make a time commitment to complete the census and mark the budgetary provisions for it, Rahul Gandhi, leader of the opposition and the parliamentarian of Congress, said Wednesday.
“We see the census as a new development paradigm in the country,” said Gandhi, who spoke at a press conference at the Office of the Indian Congress Committee (AICC) in New Delhi.
His comments occurred hours after the BJP NDA government made an announcement approving caste enumeration in the next national census in the country. This would be the first time since the independence that the enumeration of the caste would occur.
According to Gandhi, Congress feels that there is a “telengan model” that can adopt at the national level, and the party is willing to “keep the center” in the design of the central census of the cast. The plan for Telangana had been created after an exhaustive consultation of interested parties and has “granular level information.” This is in a marked contrast to the Bihar model.
With limit or 50%
“We also need to see the representation of OBC, Dalits and the participation of the caste in the power structure and in the institutes of India,” he said.
“We want a popular census, not a bureaucratic census,” Gandhi added. “We want the mass census, the open technology census and must be designed.”
According to him, there are laws that allow reservation in private educational institutions. These laws, he said, must be implemented by the center.
Gandhi also said that a 50 percent reserve limit was “retaining development” and “this must now be eliminated.”
“We have an opinion to build bones at the base level to have a caste census. And we welcome the movement of the center to take into account, a long data demand,” said the opposition leader.
Posted on April 30, 2025
