India's UID project: The caste factor

In this post we noted that the Indian government had approved the collection of caste information with the census for the first time since 1931.

For those interested in the subject of the history of caste and the Indian census, this article from Frontline [India] offers insight.

THE inclusion of caste in Census 2011 has been a vexed question for the polity. The uncertainty over the issue has now come to an end with the Group of Ministers (GoM) on Caste Census giving its consent for the exercise. Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, who led the GoM, announced in the Lok Sabha on August 12 that only the modalities remained to be sorted out.

In the past few months, caste-based enumeration has been the subject of opinion columns of newspapers, talk shows on television and discussions on the Internet. A conference on “Caste Census: Towards an Inclusive India”, held on July 23 at the Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy (CSSEIP) of the National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bangalore, provided another forum to discuss the issue at length.

Identity management is about people.

UPDATE: I forgot to include the link to the Frontline article. It's fixed now, with apologies.