User:Sitush/obcdraft

Both the Government and the States and union territories of India maintain lists of Other Backward Classes and equivalent lists for some other groups that benefit from positive discrimination measures that exist in that country. Those measures are an attempt to ameliorate the effects of perceived historic socioeconomic disparities.

Administration of the nationwide list of Other Backward Classes has been the responsibility of the National Commission for Backward Classes (NCBC) since 1993, following recommendations made by the Mandal Commission. As of October 2013, the NCBC maintains a list for thirty regions and also a list of adjudications for those regions. A community may be recorded on the national list in one region but not in another; communities in different regions may also share the same name but have no relationship to each other at all.

Although the NCBC is directed to amend the lists on a decennial basis, in practice it has ignored that, as is evidenced, for example, by their listing of gazette notifications. Any adjudication that adds or removes an entry to the lists comes into effect immediately, the details are not necessarily published at the time nor are the online versions of the central lists necessarily updated immediately. As of October 2013, the NCBC website states that it has made 1221 such adjudications, of which 766 involved addition of groups to the lists who were not previously shown. The additions rise as a result of challenges made by the communities, often based on ethnography conducted by the British Raj that is now considered to be discredited by the academic world. The overall number of officially-recognised caste communities in India has grown substantially over the years: from around 1100 recorded in 1901, the figure had been amended to 4694 by 1994. This growth can be attributed in part to changes in statistical methods but mainly because of effects such as sanskritisation and the fusion and fission of community groups as they jostle for position in society. Many of the changes to the NCBC lists are driven by political agendas: the louder voices among the caste communities tend to be successful.

The NCBC stress in their adjudications that there a difficulties of definition, due to the existence of synonyms, regional variant names, localised usage, issues of religious divisions and other factors. There are also difficulties due to spelling issues: Indian is a country of many languages and transliteration of all of those into the English language used by the NCBC gives rise to errors that may or may not be tacitly ignored in the implementations of the effects of the lists. The nature of the lists is further complicated because some parts of a community in a given area may be included and others parts excluded, often without a detailed definition issued by the NCBC itself. There are other complications, such as disagreements between government agencies with regard to naming: the census, the government's Anthropological Survey of India and the NCBC may and do classify the communities differently - it is left for local authorities to interpret the situation, and sometimes they do not agree either. The number of recognised states and union territories is also growing over time.

There is no agreement regarding the sphere of influence relating to the national and state lists. The latter are sometimes reported as being manipulated by politicians to suit their own caste-related agendas, especially in the Hindi Belt. Changes to lists are often difficult to source, leading to difference between what happens on the ground and what the lists state.