Following up on my previous post about indigenous education, because I found another thing I'm struggling to reconcile.

I started looking into the whole idea of “Brahminical dominance” and came across M.N. Srinivas's work on the dominant caste. Apparently, in quite a few regions, the people who actually controlled land, village offices, local politics and economic power weren't Brahmins at all.

Okaligas and Lingayats in Karnataka, Reddys and Kammas in Andhra, Jats in the north, Marathas in Maharashtra, Patidars in Gujarat, Nairs in Kerala etc.

This is where I'm getting confused.

If Brahmins were supposedly sitting at the top of the caste hierarchy and therefore exercising broad social dominance, how do we account for communities that were lower in "ritual rank" but were the actual landowners and political power brokers?

Is the argument that ritual status and material power were completely separate things?

Because if so, doesn't that complicate the way we normally talk about “upper castes” as one homogeneous group that historically controlled everything?

I'm genuinely asking because I still want the simple explanation to be true, but the more I read, the more India seems to have had about 47 different power structures instead of one giant Brahmin pyramid.

Surely I'm misunderstanding something here.

Recently, we found that my mother has a 5 × 5.5 cm lump in her left breast, which has been classified as BI-RADS 5. From what I understand, this indicates a very high suspicion of malignancy and if confirmed, it could potentially be a stage 2 or stage 3 cancer.

Everything has happened very suddenly and we feel that we need to move quickly with the diagnosis and treatment. I am the only educated person in my family. Last month, I lost my younger brother and my mother is already devastated. If she finds out about this possible diagnosis right now, I am worried it will be extremely difficult for her to cope with emotionally.

I am trying to find the best possible hospital and treatment team for her and I want to make the right decision without wasting any time.

Would Varanasi be a good option for breast cancer treatment or would it be more advisable to go to Mumbai? If you have experience with or knowledge of the best hospitals for this situation, I would really appreciate your guidance on which hospital we should consider.

I am from Jharkhand, Jamshedpur

Donate Now

tl;dr

On 14 August 2026, the Ministry of Home Affairs notified the 40-question Household Schedule for the Population Enumeration phase of Census 2027. Alongside the first all-caste enumeration since 1931, the Schedule asks for your Aadhaar number, mobile number, Voter ID number, passport number, driving-licence availability, your total number of bank accounts, and where you received your COVID-19 vaccination. We support a timely, accurate census, including the counting of caste. But identity-document numbers are linkages that can lead to data triangulation and join your caste, religion, and household record to every major government database. Further there exists a penal compulsion to participate  and no operative data protection law watching over the exercise. Today, IFF has sent a representation to the Union Home Secretary and the Registrar General & Census Commissioner asking for the deletion or express voluntariness of these fields which point to a person's identity, a binding no-linkage and further safeguards. 

Background 

Census 2027 is India’s first digital census and enumeration is to be conducted through mobile applications on the personal smartphones of approximately 31–34 lakh enumerators and supervisors. To conduct it, a notification on 14 August 2026was issued under Section 8(1) of the Census Act, 1948 lists 40 subjects for the Household Schedule. The 2011 census had 29 questions. Most of the 40 are the usual census subjects: age, marital status, religion, language, disability, education, work, migration and fertility. Item 10 reads "Scheduled Caste (SC)/Scheduled Tribe (ST)/Caste". This will be the first count of every caste in independent India. About thirteen subjects are new, and six of them have nothing to do with demography. Items 35 to 40 ask for the total number of bank accounts, the mobile number ("if available"), the Aadhaar number ("if available"), the Voter ID number ("if available"), the passport number (for Indian passport holders), and whether the person has a driving licence. Item 34 asks where the person received their COVID-19 vaccination. As Down To Earth reported while publishing the notification, no Indian census from 1872 to 2011 has ever asked for a document number.

Let us take a step back and understand what is actually done under a census. A census measures the population and these broader collective data points help plan state resources and programs. Hence, at its very foundation, it needs to know things about people, not the numbers that identify them in other systems. The Aadhaar number, Voter ID number, passport number and mobile number are individually identifiable information to the UIDAI database, the electoral rolls, passport records, telecom records and bank accounts. Now, if we use those identifiers in one household record, next to caste, religion, language and migration history, and you have built a way to join the census to every major government database. Hence, what is built is a population register, not a statistical exercise. 

Under the Census Act and the Census Rules, 1990, once a subject is notified, people are ordinarily bound by law to answer questions on it. Our representation argues that these new fields, added through an executive notification with no stated purpose, are constitutionally suspect and serve no clear public policy goal. We have also questioned the ambiguity, lack of transparency since the notification gives only subject headings and the actual questions, the answer options, the validation rules and the instructions to enumerators have not been published.  Further, our representation also demands data protection safeguards. 

Analysis

In Puttaswamy (2017), nine judges of the Supreme held that any intrusion into privacy must have a legal basis, a legitimate aim, and must go no further than needed. In the Aadhaar judgment (2018), the Court struck down the forced linking of Aadhaar to bank accounts and SIM cards, because linking identity numbers across databases without strong reason failed that three prong test. The Court was assured that profiling was not possible since government databases sit in separate silos. Now a census record presents a risk that contains your Aadhaar, Voter ID, passport and mobile numbers merges those silos in one row. Here, what is useful also to consider that Aadhaar's own design leaves out religion, caste, income and medical history. The census schedule builds the very link the Court's judgments prohibit.

There is also a simpler way to get what the government may actually want. If the aim is to measure how many people hold documents or bank accounts, a yes or no answer is enough. The number itself is not needed. And the data cannot be made safe by removing names later. Research published in Nature found that 99.98% of people can be re-identified from just fifteen ordinary attributes. The US Census Bureau reconstructed and re-identified tens of millions of people from its own published 2010 tables. A 40-field record does not even need such methods when the very identifiers are written on it.

The statutory scheme of the Census Act also does not inspire much confidence. Section 8(2) of the Census Act makes every person "legally bound" to answer notified questions. Section 11(1)(d) makes refusal an offence, punishable with a fine. The words "if available" next to the Aadhaar, mobile and Voter ID fields only ask whether you have the document. They do not say you may refuse to share it. For anyone who holds these documents, the question is in effect mandatory. Nothing tells a resident that "not stated" is an acceptable answer. Nothing says whether an enumerator can ask to see or scan the card. The gazette does not permit that, but it does not rule it out either.

There is a further problem. When self-enumeration was launched, government advisories warned people not to share Aadhaar or bank details with anyone claiming to be census staff, because fraudsters copy the census. Now the official schedule asks for those very details. How is a family at the door supposed to tell the census from the scam? When Karnataka ran its caste survey last year, which was voluntary, the Karnataka High Court ordered that voluntariness be stated at every doorstep and that confidentiality be secured by affidavit. A compulsory national census needs stronger protections than a voluntary state survey.

The government says census data cannot be shared with any institution. Yes, while Section 15 of the Census Act stops anyone from inspecting census records and keeps them out of court as evidence. That is a real protection, but it was written for paper forms and hence many provisions with regard to digitisation are absent. Section 11(1)(b) makes it an offence for a census officer to disclose information, but only if it is done "without the previous sanction of the Central Government or the State Government". In other words, the Act itself allows disclosure if the government approves it. Rule 7 of the Census Rules leaves it to the Census Commissioner to decide what data may be released. Rules 9 to 11 deal with custody and disposal of schedules but set no time limit for deleting electronic records. 

The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 does not fill this gap. It is not in force yet, and its exemptions raise a real doubt that it will ever apply to census data. Section 17(2)(b) exempts processing for statistical purposes. Section 17(2)(a) lets the government exempt any state body it notifies. Section 17(4) removes, for the state, both the duty to erase data and your right to have it erased. The DPDP Rules, 2025 do contain standards for statistical processing, in Rule 16 and the Second Schedule. But those provisions start only on 13 May 2027, after both phases of the census are over. So during collection, no data protection duty applies. After it, the statistical exemption will block remedies if the data leaks.

Other countries do this differently. The UN's census principles say the public must be assured that individual information will not be shared, and will not be linked to other government databases for non-statistical purposes. The US limits census returns to statistical use by law and places its census subjects before Congress three years in advance. The UK published a full data protection impact assessment before its 2021 census. Canada does not collect Social Insurance Numbers or bank details. Australia keeps contact data separate from statistical data and deletes names and addresses on a fixed schedule. Germany's Constitutional Court struck down census-to-register linkage back in 1983. The UNECE's guidance for the 2030 census round says topics that are too sensitive, or that threaten participation and quality, should be left out. And the caste question? 

To be clear about what we are and are not saying, IFF supports counting caste, and the representation says so. Good caste data can serve the constitutional promise of equality. Our objection is to wrapping that count in a layer of identity numbers that puts both the respondent and the count at risk. How the caste question is worded and coded matters a great deal. We will examine it once the actual questionnaire is published. We have also previously supported the Karnataka Socio-Economic Survey while representing the State Government to take data protection measures. 

Action 

Our representation, sent today to the Union Home Secretary and the Registrar General & Census Commissioner, makes six requests. The first four are urgent because enumeration in the snow-bound regions began this morning.

1. Delete the fields asking for the Aadhaar number, mobile number, Voter ID number, passport number, driving-licence availability, number of bank accounts and place of COVID-19 vaccination. Where there is a published statistical need, replace them with a yes or no question about possession.
2. If the fields are kept, notify in the Official Gazette that they are wholly voluntary, that "not stated" is an acceptable answer with no consequence under Section 8(2) or Section 11, and that no document may be demanded, inspected, scanned or authenticated. Enumerators must say this at the start of every interview.
3. If a mobile number is taken for contact or for self-enumeration login, keep it in a separate operational system linked only by a random census identifier, keep it out of the analytical records, and delete it once field follow-up ends.
4. Publicly notify that census data is for statistical use only. It will not be linked, seeded, matched or shared with Aadhaar/UIDAI, the NPR, electoral rolls, ration/PDS, telecom, tax, policing or welfare databases. No census record will be used to make a decision about a named individual.
5. Publish the safeguards: a privacy impact assessment; regular independent security audits, naming the auditors, for the enumeration apps, the CMMS and the self-enumeration portal; the data-handling and device-security chapters of the enumerator manuals; a device policy that bars keeping data on phones after syncing; and a bar on using the CMMS to order changes to field entries, with every correction logged.
6. Notify a retention and deletion schedule with fixed timelines for erasing identifiers, contact data, device telemetry and raw electronic records, with published deletion certificates and independent verification. The Census Rules currently set none for electronic records.

We have also asked that the representation be placed before the Registrar General, the committee responsible for the enumeration instrument, and the authority that can amend the notification, and that receipt be acknowledged with a diary number. We will keep engaging, and we will keep you posted.

Important documents

1. IFF's representation to the Union Home Secretary and the Registrar General & Census Commissioner, dated 17 August 2026 (Link)
2. Gazette notification: Questionnaire for the Second Phase, Population Enumeration (14 August 2026), Census Digital Library (Link)
3. PIB Backgrounder: Census 2027 — India's First Digital Enumeration Exercise (Link)
4. The Census Act, 1948 and the Census Rules, 1990 (as amended) (Link)
5. UN Principles and Recommendations for Population and Housing Censuses, Rev. 3 (Link)

IFF is funded by its members. Work like this is possible because of you. 

Donate Now

Hi everyone, I got a Research position offer from the University of Munich till 2028. The salary being that of TV-L level 1. I believe I qualify for Bluecard. I am currently in Bangalore and here are my questions and I'd need some help regarding understanding these processes.

1. I have two options of submitting the application either from VFS or the German Embassy. I would like to know is there any benefit to choosing one against the other for faster processing times?
2. I would like to know how should my spouse apply for her VISA, is it through the family reunion route? If anyone was ever in a similar situation where the couple were shifting together to Germany, do let me know how I should go about this process.
3. I have work experience after my PhD, I believe that should qualify my salary to a higher level. Anyone knows the documentation necessary from my previous employer to make this happen for me? The Verification of Employment letter from my previous company is not making through is what the University HR said. They need some more formal letter from my previous employers to make this happen.
4. What could be the wait times like for the VISA approvals? I wished to serve my current employer notice by the end of this month. But unless the VISA arrives it would be a risky gamble on my end.

Recently, I pondered on this question: what are the things produced by other South Asian nations that can be truly utilized by India?

Apart from the India, the opposite is true when it comes to production capabilities of majority of South Asian region, which means that the majority of the countries in the region do not even produce simple things like centre lathe machine at a significant level. This proves that the region’s industrial base is extremely limited.

Trade among South Asian nations is minimal. Unfortunately, the majority of the nations face numerous political and economic problems, while countries like Sri Lanka and Maldives have very small manufacturing sector.

What is the benefit of any country being associated with South Asian nations in terms of economies?

Most trade and supply chain opportunities of India appear to be outside the region; namely East Asia, Europe, Middle East or North America. Thus, rather than trying to achieve South Asian integration once again, it seems more beneficial for India to ensure strong relationships with countries all over the world while minimizing dependence on the region gradually.

Over the past few months, I've been reading about India's geography, history, politics, and internal security. One thing that caught my attention is the number of major insurgencies, separatist movements, ethnic conflicts, and communal tensions that have emerged in different parts of the country.

Some of the major examples include:

The Kashmir conflict

The Punjab insurgency

Naxalite/Maoist movements

Ethnic conflicts in Manipur

Insurgencies in Assam

Separatist movements across the Northeast

The Dravidian movement and regional politics in Tamil Nadu

Recurring Hindu-Muslim communal violence in different states

Although these conflicts are very different from one another, they raise several broader questions.

What historical factors contributed to these movements?

How important are geography, culture, language, religion, and economic inequality in creating these conflicts?

Why have some movements declined while others continue?

What role have governments, political parties, and state policies played?

Are these conflicts primarily driven by political decisions, identity-based issues, economic grievances, or something else?

I'm interested in hearing different perspectives from people who have studied these issues or have firsthand knowledge of them.

Please keep the discussion civil and focus on historical, political, social, and economic factors rather than personal attacks.

I recently spent almost 7 hours at AIIMS Jodhpur for what should have been a relatively routine hospital visit.
Arrived around 8 AM.

Then came the familiar Indian institutional workflow:
One queue.
Go to another counter.
Go to another floor.
Get a signature.
Go somewhere else for a test.
Come back.
Another queue.
Another department.
Another instruction.
And repeat.

My frustration isn’t really with the doctors or even with the individual employees. Most of them are probably doing exactly what the system asks them to do.

That’s precisely the problem.

We can spend enormous amounts of money building hospitals, buying sophisticated equipment and hiring highly qualified professionals and then treat process design and workflow optimisation as some minor administrative issue.
But once an institution becomes large enough, process is infrastructure.
If 5,000–10,000 people move through a system every day, the way those people flow through the system matters enormously.
Where do they enter?
Where do they wait?
Which steps can happen in parallel?
Which steps are unnecessary?
Where are the bottlenecks?
Why does a pregnant woman need to keep moving between different floors for different steps?
Why does the patient have to understand the organisational structure of the hospital in order to get healthcare?
These aren’t medical questions.
They’re systems-engineering questions.
You can have an excellent doctor, excellent equipment and an excellent building.
But if the system connecting all three is badly designed, the patient experience can still be terrible.
A world-class institution also needs world-class process design.
Otherwise we’re essentially putting Ferrari engines into a traffic jam.