Bihar Caste Survey Shows Unusual Growth In SC Population Numbers Over 2011 Census Figures - What's Going On?

The recently released caste survey data of Bihar estimates the Scheduled Caste (SC) population as 19.65 per cent of the total population. This is a unusual increase from the 2011 census which estimated the SC population as 15.91 per cent.

To understand, how much the SC population grew in Bihar in 12 years according to the data, let us look at the absolute numbers.

According to census of 2011, there were 1,65,67,325 SCs in Bihar that year, while there are 2,56,89,820 now according to the caste survey data. That's an increase of 91 lakh. This means an increase of 55 per cent in 12 years. For context, the same figures for 2001-2011 period show an increase of around 35 lakh in population and a growth rate of around 26 per cent.

The total population of Bihar increased from 10.41 crore in 2011 to 13.07 crore in 2023, as per the survey, registering an increase of 2.66 crore. This means an increase of 25.6 per cent in the given duration.

Going by the caste survey data of 2023, SC population in Bihar grew more than twice as fast as the overall population.

This doesn't reconcile with the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) data either.

In simple terms, TFR is defined as the the number of children that would be born to a woman over her lifetime.

Bihar's overall TFR was 3 in 2019-21 according to the National Family Health Survey (NHFS) 5, while the SC TFR was 3.48.

Notably, when the SC TFR was 4.78 in 2005-06 (NHFS 3) survey, the share of the SCs in Bihar's population increased from 15.7 per cent in 2001 to only 15.9 per cent in 2011.

Thus it is unlikely, that without much differential in the TFR, the SC population can become 1.5 times in 12 years.

What then, is the truth of the SC numbers in the latest survey?