New Delhi, Dec. 18: The Centre will try to wriggle out of holding a caste-based census as directed by Madras High Court last month, suggesting such an exercise would deepen divisions.

The high court had, with the reservation controversies in mind, asked for a caste-wise census across the country “at the earliest and in a time-bound manner” to help achieve “the goal of social justice in its true sense”.

If done, it would be the first caste-based census after Independence, the last one having been carried out by the British in 1931.

The high court had observed that the quota percentages for the various castes were based on 1931 population figures and were therefore unfair. Reservation percentages, it said, should be “proportionately increased by conducting a (fresh) caste-wise census”.

The Centre, however, doesn’t want to stir a political controversy, especially ahead of a general election.

“Right now, we have no plan to start a caste-based census. And there is little chance that caste will be one of the criteria during the next national census in 2011,” a Union census department official said.

He said the department had been asked to tell the court that such a census would encourage caste divisions. The government also plans to cite Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel.

“Our first home minister had made it clear that the 1931 census would be the last caste-based census, so the question of another one does not arise,” the official said.

He admitted that there was a growing demand for well-researched data to determine the quota percentages. “But to enumerate the thousands of castes in the country is not only undesirable but almost impossible.”

The government had used the same arguments when the Supreme Court asked it to update data on the country’s Other Backward Classes population in the backdrop of the reservation controversies in 2006.

The Centre had said it had an impressive volume of data, collected scientifically by the National Sample Survey Organisation, National Family Health Survey, Mandal Commission and others.

P.S. Krishnan, social welfare secretary in the 1990 V.P. Singh government when the Mandal recommendations were implemented, however, stressed the need for clear and definite data on individual caste populations.

“The government must have the exact details of at least the backward castes, if not all the castes,” said Krishnan, now honorary adviser to the human resource development ministry on reservation issues. Karnataka, though, recently started a caste-based census, becoming the first state to do so after Independence.