BENGALURU: The Karnataka High Court on Friday issued notice to the central and state governments as well as the registrar general and census commissioner of India on a batch of public interest litigations questioning the legality of the socio-economic survey. The court posted all the petitions to September 22 for a hearing on an interim plea seeking a stay on the survey.
A division bench of Justice Anu Sivaraman and Justice Rajesh Rai K passed the order on the petitions filed by Rajya Vokkaligara Sangha, Akhila Karnataka Brahmana Maha Sabha, advocate K N Subba Reddy and others against the survey scheduled to be held from September 22 to October 7.
In one of the petitions filed through advocate Abhishek Kumar and Keerthi K Reddy, Rajya Vokkaliga Sangha contended that the caste census exclusively falls within the domain of the central government under the Constitution of India, and hence the state government lacks legislative or executive competence to conduct the census.
It was also stated that the survey replicates the failed 2015 survey, which was marred by irregularities, missing records, refusal of the member-secretary of the Karnataka State Commission for Backward Classes to sign the report and suppression of results. The impugned survey suffers from grave legal and procedural defects.
The petitioners’ advocates stated that the present survey proposes to enumerate nearly seven crore individuals within 15 days, an arbitrary and unscientific timeline that contrasts with the Union census spanning several months. Impugned orders dated August 13 and 22, 2025, authorising the survey are unconstitutional and ultra vires the Karnataka State Commission for Backwards Classes Act, 1995, and inconsistent with the federal division of powers.
The hurried, arbitrary, and privacy-invasive exercise threatens social harmony and wastes public funds, they contended.
The petitioners contended that the commission has inflated sub-castes into separate castes, expanding the list from 1,400 to 1,561 in an arbitrary and politically motivated manner.
The survey methodology substitutes statutory house-listing with reliance on electricity metre numbers and geo-tagging, and proposes unlawful linkage of caste particulars with Aadhar, ration cards and phone numbers, violating the right to privacy under Article 21 as recognised in the case of Justice Puttaswamy vs Union of India. Accordingly, the petitioners sought to quash the impugned government orders and restrain the state from conducting or acting upon the proposed survey.
Stating that several objections submitted to the survey were not considered by the Commission, Akhila Karnataka Brahmana Maha Sabha contended that there is no provision to safeguard the large amount of sensitive data being collected from the citizenry, and the same may lead to misuse of the same, having catastrophic effects.
Meanwhile, a senior counsel for a petitioner expressed concern that electrical metre readers are being used for the collection of data, and all the data is being collected by private persons, for which there is no security.