CASTE IN A DIFFERENT MOULD : UNDERSTANDING THE DISCRIMINATION BY RAJESH SHUKLA, SUNIL JAIN [HARDCOVER]

Too many discussions in India take place in a data vacuum. Though matters have improved in several areas—the publishing of corporate results and GDP data on a quarterly basis and inflation on a weekly basis being examples—several critical pieces of legislation have been passed in the recent past with absolutely no data. The Right to Education Act, for instance, seeks to rid the country of ‘unrecognised’ private schools but there is no authentic official data on the number of students being educated at such schools or how their performance compares with government schools. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, similarly, is aimed at tackling the country’s unemployment problem but without a clear understanding of the scale of unemployment (unemployment surveys are conducted once every four years). Thousands of crore rupees are spent each year on various anti-poverty measures, but the government has no data on household incomes, which is why poverty estimates are mired in controversy. The lack of data on income is also a huge problem when it comes to policies like caste-based reservation, and now even religion-based affirmative action, since there is very little data on just how serious the discrimination is, assuming it does exist.

This book plugs this gap. We know that scheduled castes as a group are disadvantaged vis-à-vis the other backward classes and upper caste Hindus, but how serious is this discrimination and, more importantly, what is the reason for it? This book tells you that much of the reason lies in disparate levels of education, urbanisation and even the state of residence of these groups. A particular innovation is to track the rise in income levels of different caste groups as they move from one occupation group to another; from one educational level to another; from rural to urban settings and, within this, from small cities to large metros. A similar exercise has been done, though with a little less detail, for different religious groups.