CHANDIGARH — The National Commission for Scheduled Castes (NCSC) on Tuesday issued formal notices to both the Punjab Government and the Directorate of Census Operations following an official complaint alleging the use of casteist and derogatory language in official documentation prepared for the state’s upcoming national census. The statutory body has demanded an explicit action-taken report from the regional census director and the state’s Principal Secretary for the Department of Social Justice, Empowerment and Minorities within a strict 15-day deadline.
The administrative intervention was triggered by a formal grievance submitted to NCSC Chairperson Kishor Makwana by Hardeep Singh Gill, the Vice-Chairperson of the National Commission for Safai Karamcharis. According to the complaint, specific classification terminology used within the official state lists to describe the Valmiki community was deeply offensive, sparking widespread public outrage and condemnation among community members. Acknowledging the extreme social sensitivity surrounding the matter, the federal commission initiated a swift statutory inquiry to determine how the controversial vocabulary was cleared for publication.
Chairperson Kishor Makwana emphasized that safeguarding the fundamental rights, societal respect, and human dignity of Scheduled Castes remains the absolute priority of the monitoring commission. The NCSC explicitly warned regional authorities that a failure to file a comprehensive response within the stipulated 15 days will compel the commission to invoke its constitutional powers under Article 338 of the Constitution of India. These provisions grant the apex monitoring body the powers of a civil court, enabling it to issue binding legal summonses to force the personal appearance of senior state bureaucrats before the panel.
The controversy unfolds as administrative bodies finalize field logistics for the highly anticipated Census 2027, which represents the 16th national census in India’s history and the 8th since independence. The critical demographic exercise will be executed in two distinct operational phases. Phase I begins with an initial self-enumeration window scheduled from April 30 to May 14, 2026, which will be immediately followed by an intensive house-to-house enumeration drive from May 15 to June 13. Phase II of the operation, which handles comprehensive population enumeration, is scheduled to take place nationally from February 9 to February 28, 2027, breaking a long delay after the 2021 census cycle was indefinitely postponed due to the pandemic.
