Bihar’s First Transgender Sub-Inspectors | 11 Jul 2024

Recently, three transgenders qualified the Bihar Police Subordinate Services Commission (BPSSC) exam to become police sub-inspectors.

Following a Patna High Court judgment in 2021, the State government had asked BPSSC to recruit third genders into police services.
According to the 2022 caste survey conducted in Bihar, the transgender population is reported to be 825 (0.0006%).
- This figure contrasts sharply with the 2011 census, which recorded 40,827 transgenders in the state.

According to the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill 2019, transgender means a person whose gender does not match with the gender assigned to that person at birth.
It includes trans-person with intersex variations, gender-queer and people having such socio-cultural identities as kinnar, hijra, aaravani and jogta.
India’s 2011 Census was the first census in its history to incorporate the number of ‘trans’ population of the country. The report estimated that 4.8 million Indians identified as transgender.

Origin of Census:
- The origin of the Census in India goes back to the colonial exercise of 1881.
- Census has evolved and been used by the government, policymakers, academics, and others to capture the Indian population, access resources, map social change, delimitation exercise, etc.
First Caste Census as SECC (Socio-Economic and Caste Census):
- SECC was conducted for the first time in 1931.
- SECC is meant to canvass every Indian family, both in rural and urban India, and ask about their:
  - Economic status, so as to allow Central and State authorities to come up with a range of indicators of deprivation, permutations, and combinations of which could be used by each authority to define a poor or deprived person.
  - It is also meant to ask every person their specific caste name to allow the government to re-evaluate which caste groups were economically worse off and which were better off.