Jharkhand Chief Minister Champai Soren on Sunday announced that the state will conduct a caste-based survey on the lines of Bihar.

The Jharkhand Mukti Morcha leader shared a clipping of a news report on social media that said that the state personnel department will prepare a draft for conducting the survey.

“Bigger the population, bigger the share,” Soren said on social media on Sunday. “Jharkhand is ready.”

The standard operating procedure prepared by the department will then be placed before the state Cabinet for approval, Vinay Kumar Choubey, the principal secretary to the chief minister, told PTI.

The survey will be conducted after the Lok Sabha elections, Choubey said.

The Bihar government had conducted the caste survey in two phases last year. The findings of its survey revealed that the Other Backward Classes and the Extremely Backward Classes constitute over 63% of the state’s population.

The state government had started the caste survey in January after the Union government said it will not undertake such an exercise for other than the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes as part of the nationwide Census.

Bihar’s ruling coalition, at the time of the survey, had said that a caste-based survey will help identify the true population of the state’s Other Backward Classes and other castes, helping pave the way for policies such as expanded quotas. At that time, the state’s ruling coalition comprised Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United), the Rashtriya Janata Dal and the Congress.

In January, Kumar’s party quit the alliance and formed a government along with the Bharatiya Janata Party.

The Congress, an ally of the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha, has promised that it will carry out a nationwide caste census if it is voted to power in the Lok Sabha elections.

The Opposition parties have been demanding a nationwide caste census to corner the ruling BJP ahead of the general election.

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