THE CASTE CLIFFHANGER

Siddaramaiah's second caste survey rolls on-under a court greenlight, and a boycott shadow

- By Ajay Sukumaran

ATUMULTUOUS START. That's what Karnataka's latest attempt to map the socio-economic conditions of Other Backward Classes (OBCs) got off to on September 22.

Depending on how the weather conditions develop, the question is whether it will elude the fate of its predecessor-the 2015 caste survey conducted during Siddaramaiah's first term as CM, whose findings took ten years to see the light of day. Or will Karnataka be able and willing to produce something more enlightening than a long bureaucratic coma? The logistics of the door-to-door survey presently under way are already daunting: it aims to cover about 14.37 million households and 70 million citizens within a 16-day window, ending October 7. The report is slated to be out by December-if all goes well.

More formidable than its demographic footprint is the demonology it has to surmount. Not that it was unexpected.

In August, when the Siddaramaiahled government ordered the survey, it was precisely because of the opposition its 2015 forerunner faced. Dubbed a 'caste census, that one had scythed through a forbidding path-only to fall to a veto from Veerashaiva-Lingayats and Vokkaligas, who feared a drop in their population estimates and consequently decried it as 'unscientific'.