Expert Group to submit report on caste survey by next month
Hyderabad: The State government's Expert Group will formulate a 'Composite Backwardness Index' (CBI) using the caste census data to measure disparities across 243 sub-castes.
An Expert Working Group under the Chairmanship of Justice Sudarshan Reddy will study, analyse and interpret the data collected under the Social Education Employment Economic Political Caste (SEEEPC) Survey of 2024.
The group consists of nine full-time members and other special invitees with expertise in sociology, caste studies, history, policy, law, economics, statistics and other domains who are working in an honorary capacity to prepare a report of their findings of the SEEEPC survey. After the first three meetings held in Hyderabad, the fourth meeting of the Expert Group was held in New Delhi on Thursday at the Constitution Club. The Telangana 2024 SEEEPC exercise is a robust survey of 3.55 crore people with 75 fields of information about each person covering social, economic, educational, identity, occupational and living aspects of their daily lives. It enumerates people across 243 sub-castes and an option of 'No Caste' for those that do not wish to divulge and 'Others' for those that do not fall into any of the sub-castes listed in the enumeration manual.
The Expert Group will move to the next phase of the drafting of the report and expects to submit the report to the State government in a month's time.
The report will present as ordinal ranking of relative backwardness of each sub-caste based on the CBI score as well as ranking of each sub-caste on each of the seven categories and parameters used for evaluation.
The Expert Group has also recommended that the government provide a natural language interface using Artificial Intelligence to the SEEEPC dataset in aggregate form without revealing any household specific information and make it available for further analysis for the larger research fraternity.
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