Around 100 British MPs, including Indian-origin lawmakers, have asked the UK Statistics Authority to include Sikhs as a separate ethnic box for the 2021 census to give the community a fair access to all public services in the country.
Virendra Sharma, one of senior-most Indian-origin Labour MPs in the British Parliament said, “”I believe that wherever possible it is right that people should be given the opportunity to identify themselves. With more than 400,000 Sikhs in the UK but no real way to track that without the separate box on the census, now is the right time to let people define as they wish.”
Sikhs are a legally recognised ethnic group under the UK’s Race Relations Act 1976 and campaigners for the change believe this gives them a right to be able to identify themselves separately from current census options, such as Indian or British Indian.
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