Counting castes in India has always been about more than numbers - it is about who gets a share of government benefits and who doesn't.

The country's next national census, scheduled for 2027, will - for the first time in nearly a century - count every caste, a social hierarchy that has long outlived kingdoms, empires and ideologies.

The move ends decades of political hesitation and follows pressure from opposition parties and at least three states that have already gone ahead with their own surveys. A 2011 survey - neither run nor verified by census authorities or released by the government - recorded an astonishing 4.6 million caste names.

A full count of castes promises a sharper picture of who truly benefits from affirmative action and who is left behind. Advocates say it could make welfare spending more targeted and help recalibrate quotas in jobs and education with hard evidence.

Yet in a provocative new book, The Caste Con Census, scholar-activist Anand Teltumbde warns that the exercise may harden the deeply discriminatory caste system, when the need is to dismantle it.

The argument cuts against the prevailing view that better data will produce fairer policy. For Mr Teltumbde, castes are "too pernicious to be managed for any progressive purpose".

"Caste is, at its core, a hierarchy seeking impulse that defies measurement," he writes.

Mr Teltumbde sees the modern caste census as a colonial echo.

British administrators began counting castes in 1871 as a "deliberate response to the post-1857 unity of Indians across caste and religion", turning it into an "effective tool of imperial control". They held six caste censuses between 1871 and 1931 - the last full caste enumeration in India.

Each count, Mr Teltumbde argues, "did not merely record........

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