M. Vijayanunni, the former census commissioner, continued to speak out publicly against the combined caste-wise enumeration and BPL survey just before the project began in late July 2011. His prescient comments outlined the legal distinction between the decennial census and the BPL survey, related operational differences, and the shortcomings of the revised survey instrument. Vijayanunni pointed out that the SEC survey remained a project designed to identify those households living below the poverty line and differentiate among households that faced different degrees of food insecurity, housing insecurity, and poverty. While the project sought to pinpoint households above the poverty line, it did not seek to distinguish within this broad grouping. Detailing the socioeconomic profiles of comparatively privileged households fell outside the scope of the BPL identification. As such, degrees of privilege remained comparatively masked by the survey instrument. The survey did not seek to generate “a caste-wise socio-economic profile of the population of India” as required for the implementation of reservation benefits and related legal cases. Vijayanunni argued that inserting a caste question into a survey whose purpose was to identify poor households could not generate a comprehensive caste-wise socioeconomic profile of the country, nor a more detailed understanding of caste-based power.