The Jharkhand Education Department has added an 'Other' option to the religion column in the DAHAR 2.0 school survey following objections from Adivasi groups. The survey maps enrolment and dropout data for children aged three to 18 years. Tribal leaders had demanded recognition for the Sarna faith and other indigenous beliefs.
The Jharkhand Education Department has modified the DAHAR (Digital Habitation Mapping and Real-time Monitoring) 2.0 survey by adding an 'Other' category to the religion column. This change comes after objections from Adivasi groups, who criticized the earlier format for lacking provisions for Sarna or other indigenous belief systems.
The survey, conducted by the Jharkhand Education Project Council under the Samagra Shiksha framework, aims to prepare the annual work plan and budget for school education by mapping enrolment and dropout data for children aged three to 18 years. Previously, the religion column offered only six options—Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian, Jain, and Buddhist—leaving Adivasi children's religious identities unrepresented. Adivasi leaders, including Premshahi Munda and former minister Geetashree Oraon, highlighted that this omission would render Adivasi religious identity invisible in official education data, potentially impacting policy planning and budget allocations.
Congress leader Geetashree Oraon stated, "The Sarna community strongly opposes the conduct of any census or survey in a Fifth Schedule state like Jharkhand without a separate or appropriate religion code for Adivasis. This is the government’s strategy to forcefully bring the Adivasis into the Hindu fold and to destroy the Sarna identity."
JEPC Project Director Shashi Ranjan explained that the survey format was adopted from the Union government, with the state digitizing an existing questionnaire for annual out-of-school children surveys. He added, "This is an annual exercise. Earlier, it was done physically through a detailed form in which the ‘Other’ category was already in-built. When we made it app-based, some fields did not reflect properly due to technical issues. These issues have been corrected."
The DAHAR survey, introduced in Jharkhand over a decade ago and upgraded to 2.0, serves as a key tool for both the Centre and the state to assess school coverage, identify dropouts, and plan infrastructure and welfare interventions under the Samagra Shiksha campaign.