Telangana kicks off caste survey with last-minute questionnaire tweaks

Telangana's first Backward Classes survey, which began Wednesday with a house-listing exercise, featured a revised questionnaire with last-minute additions. The final version, containing 56 questions, inquires about threats or discrimination faced at places of worship and details about inter-caste marriages in the family. The revisions also included modifications to education and housing sections.

HYDERABAD: A question seeking to know if respondents had faced threats, coercion or discrimination while visiting places of worship was among several last-minute additions or modifications to the questionnaire for Telangana's first Backward Classes survey that commenced Wednesday with a house-listing exercise. Sources said the questionnaire was revised multiple times over the past fortnight, resulting in around eight versions being drafted prior to the start of the three-phase survey. The final one contains 56 broad questions.

Question No. 55 pertains to information about any family member of a respondent having an inter-caste marriage. Several of the modifications are in the education section of the questionnaire, one of which asks respondents to specify the stage at which they may have dropped out of school.

The penultimate draft contained three education-related questions, while the final version contains an additional query. Some of the important revisions in the questionnaire pertain to housing. tnn.