Karnataka caste census: Enumerators farming out the survey work to their students!

Bengaluru: If you had any doubt that Bengaluru is the hub of ‘outsourcing’, this should put it to rest: We do it even with the Chief Minister Siddaramaiah's pet project, the caste census!

Complaints that enumerators -- a majority of them teachers -- were farming out the survey work for the census to their students, assistants and sundry others have been coming in from several parts of the state, but one incident in Bengaluru takes the cake. Not least because it was Chief Minister Siddaramaiah's media adviser Dinesh Amminamattu who found out what was happening.

Mr Amminamattu said that an enumerator visited his house seeking information about his family as part of the survey. “I expected a school teacher, but the girl who came in looked like a student. Her identity card said she was a ‘supervisor’. When I quizzed her further, she admitted that she was not an enumerator, a neighbour who was a teacher had sent her to do the job. When I called the teacher, she confessed that she had sent the girl as she had fallen ill”.

He alerted the state Backward Classes Commission chairman H. Kantharaj as well as the Chief Minister himself.