Bihar

• 11 Jul 2024

Bihar’s First Transgender Sub-Inspectors

Why in News?

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

Key Points

• 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.

Transgender

• 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.

Census

• 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.