The expert group has analysed the data from caste census conducted by Telangana government across the state from November 2024 to January 2025
Hyderabad: The state government’s expert working group led by retired Judge of Supreme Court, Justice B Sudarshan Reddy will formulate a ‘Composite Backwardness Index’ using the caste census data to measure disparities across 243 sub-castes in Telangana. The expert group, constituted by the state government, has finished the statistical and data work and had a detailed discussion of the findings of the index in the meeting held on Thursday.
The expert group has analysed the data from caste census conducted by Telangana government across the state from November 2024 to January 2025.
Expert working group convenor Praveen Chakravarty, in a media statement, on Thursday, said that there was a consensus on the index method, the parameters used for analysis, the graphical representation and the larger findings.
The expert group will use up to 43 parameters split between rural and urban population under seven categories, namely, social, education, living standards, occupation, income, movable and immovable assets and access to finance and banking to compute a holistic measure of backwardness. It may be recalled that the Mandal Commission report used 11 parameters to compute relative backwardness of sub-castes.
Of the 243 sub-castes, 73 sub-castes constitute 96 per cent of the entire population of Telangana. These include 10 sub-castes of Scheduled Castes, 7 sub-castes of Scheduled Tribes, 45 sub-castes of Backward Classes and 11 sub-castes of other castes.
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, he said.
"The report will present as ordinal ranking of relative backwardness of each sub caste based on the index score as well as ranking of each subcaste on each of the seven categories and parameters used for evaluation.The next meeting of the expert group will be held soon for the discussion and approval of the final report," he said.
The expert group has also recommended the state government to provide a natural language interface using artificial intelligence to the caste census dataset in aggregate form without revealing any household specific information and make it available for further analysis for the larger research fraternity.
