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Opinion | The Next Chapter of Freedom: Data, Dignity, and Women’s Rights
Political freedom is only the beginning. For millions of Indian women, true freedom still depends on access, opportunity, safety and the power to make their own choices.
The Independence Day compels me to ask what freedom means in the lives of ordinary Indians. Political freedom was a necessary condition, but it was not entirely sufficient to bring personal freedom to the lives of women. As we know, the personal is political, and political freedom rings hollow if women don’t have the freedom to study, to work, to move safely, to choose whether and when to marry, to decide if and when to have children, and to live without the fear of violence or discrimination.
These freedoms are guaranteed in principle, but they are not experienced equally. A woman’s opportunities can be shaped not only by her gender, but also by where she lives, the caste and community she belongs to, her household income and her access to education, healthcare and employment. Public policy often recognises these disadvantages separately. Women constitute one category; caste another; poverty a third. Lived experience is rarely so neatly divided.
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Census 2027 offers an important opportunity to change this.
For the first time since Independence, the Census will enumerate caste beyond the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe categories. The Population Enumeration phase, scheduled for 2027 in most of the country, will also collect demographic, socio-economic, educational, migration and fertility-related information. If designed and used carefully, this could help us understand not simply how many people belong to different communities, but how gender and social identity intersect with opportunity.
India already produces vast quantities of data, and recent evidence shows significant progress. NFHS-6, conducted across nearly 6.79 lakh households in 715 districts, finds that institutional deliveries have risen to 90.6 per cent and antenatal-care coverage to 95.9 per cent. Unmet need for family planning has fallen to 8.5 per cent, while the use of hygienic menstrual protection among young women aged 15–24 has increased to 79.2 per cent.
These national gains matter. But averages can also conceal inequality.
Knowing that nine in ten births take place in institutions does not tell us which women remain outside the system, and which of them face discrimination even when they do find access. Knowing national levels of contraceptive access does not tell us enough about whose reproductive choices remain constrained. The same applies to school completion, paid work, access to assets or protection from violence. Geography explains part of these differences; income explains another part. Caste and gender can compound them further.
That is where better disaggregated data becomes an instrument of equality.
In health, it could help identify communities where women are systematically being left behind in maternal care, reproductive healthcare or nutrition. In education, it could show where girls from particular social groups are dropping out, and at what stage. In employment, caste and gender data used alongside labour statistics can help us look beyond headline female workforce participation to the kind of work women perform, the insecurity they face and the opportunities they are excluded from. This is particularly important in the context of India’s changing demographic landscape. UNFPA estimates that the share of India’s population aged 60 and above will rise from 10.5% in 2022 to 20.8% by 2050, underscoring the need for more granular data on ageing, especially the distinct vulnerabilities of older women.
For women’s safety, the Census itself will not tell us who experiences violence. But accurate population denominators, analysed alongside NCRB crime data, combined responsibly with health and service-delivery data, can help governments understand where support systems are weakest and where investments in shelters, healthcare, legal assistance and prevention are most urgently required. After two decades, we will finally have access to this crucial data.
The quality of the exercise will therefore matter as much as the decision to undertake it. Caste enumeration is complex. Questions must be designed carefully, categories and coding must be transparent, enumerators need adequate training, and individual information must remain protected. Most importantly, the eventual data should be released in ways that allow meaningful analysis across gender, age, geography and socio-economic status.
Data should never become another way of reducing people to identities. Its purpose must be the opposite: to reveal inequalities that broad categories and national averages can hide.
This matters because equality cannot be delivered through one-size-fits-all policy. A programme designed simply for “women” can miss the women who face the greatest barriers. Evidence can tell us whether the last mile is actually being reached—and allow budgets, services and institutions to respond accordingly.
The caste enumeration can contribute to that task if we treat it not merely as an exercise in counting communities, but as part of a larger commitment to understanding disadvantage and acting on it. Rather than hoping the benefits of policymaking trickle down to the last mile, we can finally plan and to begin progress from the fringes.
India’s freedom struggle was built on the promise of equal citizenship. Eight decades later, we are still fighting to make equality a reality in the lives of millions of women and girls. While data is not justice by itself, it can help make these inequalities visible, and bring us closer to designing policies and programmes that effectively respond to them.
The author is the Executive Director at Population Foundation of India. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
Key Questions Answered
Ask News18Caste enumeration in India could face challenges such as the risk of respondents reporting a vast number of distinct caste names, as happened in 2011, and resistance to using a structured drop-down menu of recognised caste categories. There are also concerns about how to accurately record people’s caste and avoid repeating past errors.
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Original source: https://www.news18.com/lifestyle/relationship/
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