Start here
Census 2011 SC/ST tables
Population, work, occupation, education, housing, and district or sub-district identifiers. These establish broad administrative patterns, not jati-level truth.
Census of India tables ↗Project zero · founding document
Active build · Dadri prototype in progress
Annihilation
Atlas
An anti-caste observatory of land, labour, classification, segregation, resistance, and memory.
This project begins from a position, not a pretence of neutrality. Caste and jati are systems of material and social domination. They organise property, labour, intimacy, knowledge, space, and violence. The purpose of this atlas is to assist their annihilation—not to preserve hierarchy as heritage, nor to make oppressed people more legible to power.
01 · Position
What we stand for
Anti-caste thought is the project’s foundation. Marxian analysis gives us tools for studying land, labour, ownership, exploitation, and accumulation; it cannot be used to dissolve caste into class.
Dalit, Bahujan, Adivasi, minority, feminist, and workers’ knowledge will be treated as constitutive of the archive—not commentary appended to official knowledge.
Every map must ask who owns, who labours, who appropriates, who is excluded, and how those relations are reproduced and resisted.
State records, surveys, censuses, and colonial texts are evidence about institutions and their categories. They are not transparent descriptions of social truth.
02 · Refusals
What this project will never become
- A surname-to-caste identification machine.
- A searchable directory of individuals or vulnerable settlements.
- A ranking of jatis, communities, or supposedly fixed social traits.
- A caste-coloured map that disguises uncertain classifications as fact.
- A spectacle of atrocity in which oppressed people appear only as victims.
- A database that publishes sensitive material merely because it can.
03 · Evidence
No number without its history
Every published measure will remain attached to its source, date, geographic unit, category-maker, exclusions, uncertainty, and known contestations. “Not collected,” “not released,” “not comparable,” and “unsafe to publish” are valid findings.
VALUESOURCEPLACE + PERIODWHO CLASSIFIED?WHAT IS ABSENT?WHO CONTESTS IT?
04 · Prototype I
Dadri: what the map cannot say
The first release begins in Dadri, Gautam Buddha Nagar, and grows from Anindya's participation in the Dadri Forecast collective. It follows the historical transition of land, labour, caste and jati power, communalism, ecology, development, and collective resistance. The Atlas draws from that situated relationship without claiming to speak for the collective or for Dadri.
- The MapA spatial claim that reveals its own limits.
- The MeasureLand, labour, occupation, housing, or education.
- The FileHow an administrative category was produced and contested.
- The AbsenceWhat the available evidence cannot tell us.
- The StruggleMovements, organisation, refusal, and collective memory.
05 · Data desk
What we need first
Collect original files together with questionnaires, codebooks, technical reports, and download dates. Do not clean or rename the originals. The first geographic case will determine which subset becomes Prototype I.
Start here
Periodic Labour Force Survey
Unit-level employment, occupation, industry, wages, social group, gender, and survey weights. We need the data files and their layouts for one annual round.
Government microdata catalogue ↗Material relations
Agriculture Census
Operational holdings and area by social group, gender, tenure, and holding size. Its measure of operational holdings must not be mistaken for complete ownership relations.
Agriculture Census ↗Institutions
Crime in India
District or state tables on recorded offences against Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, accompanied by definitions and reporting limitations.
NCRB reports ↗Labour + abolition
Sanitation work records
Manual-scavenging surveys, NAMASTE documents, sewer and septic-tank death records, rehabilitation reports, and the survey instruments that produced official counts.
Social Justice Ministry archive ↗Health + reproduction
NFHS-5
Household and individual microdata for health, education, assets, social group, religion, and gender. Access requires registration and careful disclosure control.
DHS data access ↗Counter-archive
Movement materials
Anti-caste periodicals, pamphlets, speeches, oral histories, union records, community publications, memorials, and local-language scholarship. Begin with bibliographic metadata; copyright and consent govern publication.
Libraries, movement archives, personal collectionsCartography
Boundaries and concordances
Village, sub-district, district, and state boundaries matched to the year of each dataset, plus a documented crosswalk for boundary changes.
Census geospatial resources ↗06 · Immediate collection brief
Bring the archive in intact
For every source, preserve:
- Original downloaded file
- Questionnaire and codebook
- Methodology or sampling document
- Source URL and access date
- Licence or terms of use
- Your notes about missing fields or access barriers
The next decision is political and empirical: the first place, and the first material relation we want to make visible.