Caste Census In Maharashtra? Opposition Seeks Similarity To Bihar's Model

Leader of Opposition in the Maharashtra legislative assembly Vijay Wadettiwar on Tuesday demanded the state government to carry out a caste-based census on the lines of Bihar.

He was speaking in the assembly during the ongoing winter session of the state legislature here. ''The Maharashtra government should carry out a caste-wise census in the state on the lines of the Bihar government. We are not opposed to any particular community getting benefits of quota,'' he said.

''The census should find out how backward people are there in every community in the state,'' he said. In October, the Nitish Kumar government in Bihar released findings of its caste survey which revealed that Other Backward Classes (OBCs) and Extremely Backward Classes (EBCs) constitute a whopping 63 per cent of the state's total population.

Ever since the Bihar caste survey was out, the national leaders of the Congress, including Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, have been pressing for a caste census in the country. In the run-up to the assembly elections in Madhya Pradesh, Rahul Gandhi had described caste census as an ''X-ray'' which will reveal the proportion of the OBCs, Dalits and tribals in the population.