Reservations in India

The constitutional purpose of affirmative action and the preferential treatment for the deprived and the vulnerable that it implied was to address the anomalies and contradictions of our society, specifically focusing on caste, religion, and patriarchy. Caste quotas have become a quest for upward social mobility; the creamy layer of recipient communities uses them for its own partisan benefit to the exclusion of those more disadvantaged and more deserving in their own communities. Minority rights consolidate the traditional elites and religious leaders of these communities who become fundamentalist to preserve the status quo. Recapturing the constitutional vision of an inclusive and egalitarian society and a participative and integrated democracy will demand another model of development, with more fine-tuned affirmative policies and a more focused preferential treatment for the disadvantaged.

Recent debates regarding inclusion of caste in 2011 Census have raised questions about whether caste still matters in modern India. Ethnographic studies of the mid-20th century identified a variety of dimensions along which caste differentiation occurs. At the same time, whether this differentiation translates into hierarchy remains a contentious issue as does the persistence of caste, given the economic changes of the past two decades. Using data from a nationally representative survey of 41,554 households conducted in 2005, this paper examines the relationship between social background and different dimensions of well-being. The results suggest continued persistence of caste disparities in education, income and social networks.

The root of the problem of poor dalit achievement in India lies in the many dysfunctional primary and secondary schools in the villages and towns. Affirmative action policies, which are implemented to boost a deprived group's employment rate, suffer from several defects, in particular, they have only a small effect when the group's educational base is low. Social exclusion robs people of their "confidence" and this loss adversely affects their capacity to function.

This is with reference to “Comparative Contexts of Discrimination: Caste and Untouchability in South Asia” by Surinder S Jodhka and Ghanshyam Shah (EPW, 27 November 2010).

A response to the article "The Politics of Not Counting Caste" (EPW, 19 June 2010) and the editorial "Why We Must Count Caste" (22 May) on caste in the 2011 Census, contesting the main arguments therein on the need to enumerate all castes during the enumeration.