Overview

• At a Bengaluru press conference, Archbishop Peter Machado said the Church will cooperate with the Social and Educational Survey, which the government has described as not a caste count.
• He urged the government to restore Hindu caste-prefix identifiers for Christian groups in the published list after the final analysis, warning deletions could hinder access to welfare.
• The Backward Classes Commission has masked 33 such names in the survey roster after objections, and it has excluded 14 SC-linked Christian castes from the handbook and the app dropdown.
• Christian leaders said they seek clarity on the community’s population from this exercise and may later ask for reservation reclassification from 3B to 2C depending on the data.
• The door-to-door, app-based survey runs statewide from September 22 to October 7, with political and legal challenges continuing as officials push to complete data collection.