Naukri.com, which voluntarily started gathering data about caste from registered job seekers from May 2006, said 19 per cent of them were women, 3.4 per cent OBCs, 0.8 per cent SCs and 0.2 per cent STs.

There are over 130,000 OBCs, 38,000 SCs and STs, 760,000 women, and 8,000 physically challenged job seekers registered on the job portal.

"The purpose of gathering these data is to support clients' efforts in affirmative action hiring, should a company want to boost its strength in any of these categories," said Sanjeev Bikchandani, CEO of  InfoEdge, which owns Naukri.com.

The job site initially started collecting such data in response to demands from public sector undertakings that wanted to hire backward caste candidates to fill their mandatory quota.

Bikchandani said the company had not yet opened these fields in its r�sum� database for search by clients but planned to do so once its data reached critical mass. Naukri.com has a client base of over 27,000 companies and a database of over 10 million r�sum�s.

If the market response to such data is positive, Naukri.com will collect data on people from traditionally excluded ethnic  and linguistic communities and parts of the country, and support affirmative action efforts in those areas.