Untouchability is a subject best brushed under the carpet. Stalin K., one of the country’s best known documentary filmmakers, obviously had no such intention when he embarked on a four-year journey to probe, push and pick on issues related to casteism. The result has been a poignantly mesmerising, and sometimes debatable, film titled ‘India Untouched [...]

In this study, Ashwini Deshpande & Katherine Newman attempts to trace the differential pathways that dalit and non-dalit students from comparable elite educational backgrounds traverse in their journey from college to work. While the training they receive in the university world is quite comparable, dalit students lack many advantages that turn out to be crucial in shaping [...]

The Legacy of Social Exclusion: A Correspondence Study of Job Discrimination in India is an article by Sukhadeo Thorat and Paul Attewell that examines the prevalence of discrimination in the job application process of private sector enterprises in India. The study is based on a field experiment where authors replied to job advertisements in major English dailies [...]

S Madheswaran, Paul Atte’s  paper uses National Sample Survey data to examine the wage gap between higher castes and the scheduled castes/tribes in the regular salaried urban labour market. The main conclusions we draw are (a) discrimination causes 15 per cent lower wages for SC/STs as compared to equally qualified others; (b) SC/ST workers are [...]

Untouchability in Rural India is a book published by Sage Publications in 2006 written by Ghanshyam Shah, Harsh Mander, Sukhdeo Thorat, Satish Deshpande and Amita Baviskar is reviewed bu Ashok Gopal from InfoIndia here. The Book contains first time methodical survey in 565 villages across 11 states reveals that in 73% of villages, dalits cannot [...]

“Caste” One Billion Eyes, the annual Indian documentary film festival organised by the Prakriti Foundation, Chennai, is in its third year. This year’s theme is Caste. The theme for 2005 was ‘Arts, Activism, Animals’, and for 2006 it was ‘Our Cities: the Real and the Imagined’. In India, caste consumes everyone. From the brahmin priests [...]

This is a field study done by Vidya Bhushan Rawat. We feel happy in sharing his study with our readers. Hope readers find it effective in reaching out to those who are least reached due to heinous caste system.  Laar is a small town in Deoria district of Eastern Uttar-Pradesh. Like any other town in Uttar-Pradesh, this [...]

“Surveys by the NSSO and the NFHS classify people on the basis of their broad responses and do not enumerate the caste categories”, says Rajalaxmi  THE recent Supreme Court order staying the 27 per cent reservation for Other Backward Classes in admissions to Central higher educational institutions has raised the issue of the validity of [...]

West Bengal does not usually feature in the list of Indian states with caste discrimination. Uddalak Mukherjee and Anusua Mukherjee travel to Malda and discover that the real picture might be different .   Pic01: Any sign of change?  “No group ever sets itself up as the One without at once setting up the Other [...]

Days of self proclaimed social scientists in India are not over yet. Apart from administrative sector and private sector,  caste virus still finds its ways in higher echelons in Academic and research circles. These are the people who uphold the graded inequality in their minds and then silently introduce it in their professional practices. Here is one of the best article from Balmurli Natrajan who spares [...]

 Abhinaya Ramesh, Research Scholar, Lancaster University, UK takes stock of the situation of violance against Dalits and a doubtful silence among academicians on it  UN/HDR 2004: ‘Final Draft [Regional Paper] Caste, Ethnicity and Exclusion in South Asia: The Role of Affirmative Action Policies in Building Inclusive Societies’ is compiled by  D.L.Sheth. This report is on subjugating practices [...]

Following is the article written by Gail Omvedt, an American Scholar staying in India from last 25 years and engaged wholistically in the movement for equality unlike other sitting-scholars. The article is taken from BuddistCircle where she keeps on providing her scholarly inputs. She has  authored many books ; out of which the most celebrated [...]