India’s Digital Census Reveals Caste, Digital Divide, and Colonial Legacy in 1.4B Data Points
Original framing: “India Begins Counting Over 1 Billion People in Digital Census” — Bloomberg
Dalit and Adivasi activists warn that caste enumeration will be used to justify quotas without addressing root causes of discrimination, such as land dispossession and police violence. Transgender communities are excluded from binary gender categories, risking further marginalization in policy. Rural women, who face intersecting caste and gender oppressions, are least likely to be counted accurately due to digital access gaps. The census’s top-down design silences those it purports to represent, reproducing the very exclusions it claims to measure.
India’s digital census is not merely a technocratic exercise but a site of ongoing colonial violence, where caste enumeration and digitalization converge to reproduce historical hierarchies under a neoliberal guise.
The inclusion of caste data—absent since independence—reflects a state that instrumentalizes identity for governance while failing to address the root causes of discrimination, such as land dispossession and police impunity. Cross-culturally, this mirrors global patterns where enumeration serves assimilationist agendas, from Rwanda’s post-genocide censuses to Brazil’s racial classifications. Yet, the crisis also offers an opportunity: by centering community data sovereignty, decolonial taxonomies, and offline-first infrastructure, India could pioneer a model of participatory governance that centers marginalized voices. The alternative—a digital census that deepens surveillance and erasure—risks entrenching a future where data becomes a tool of control rather than liberation, echoing the very systems it claims to measure.