Another shameful incident has brought the caste inequalities in an otherwise modern India to the fore. Parents rioted outside a school in Uttar Pradesh after discovering that the cook who prepared food for their children under the mid-day meal scheme was a Dalit.   The Government middle school in the newly created Ramabai Nagar district of Uttar Pradesh has 191 students, nearly half of them who belong to so-called upper castes...

While the landmark Right to Education Act takes the promise of primary education to more than eight million children, there are still many lacunae on the ground. But, as the Shiksha Adhikar Yatra, conducted by Dalit organisations in UP and Rajasthan showed, citizens now have the tools to demand and receive effective governance.  The landmark right to information act has made a huge impact at the local level on the...

Can more knowledge about our society, about the individuals and groups who constitute it, be a bad thing? I’ve been wondering about this lately, in the context of two government initiatives to gather more knowledge about us Indians, as caste groups and as individuals. Both of these information-gathering exercises—the proposal for a “caste census”, which has generated a stormy argument, and the merely desultory discussion over the planned Unique Identification...

Amitabh Bachchan says that if ever asked about his caste by Census enumerators, his answer would be: Caste – Indian. That, of course, would do little more than stoke the media's bollywood feeding frenzy yet again. Shyam Maharaj is no Bachchan. Nor is his brother, Chaitanya Prabhu. But they and the followers of their fraternity will likely throw up far more complex answers — and questions — if Census enumerators...

Taking a serious view of recent arson against Balmiki community by upper caste men in Mirchpur in Haryana, the Supreme Court on Wednesday issued a warning to the Bhupinder Singh Hooda government: serious consequences will follow if atrocities against dalits are reported again. Directing the Hisar district administration to build new houses in place of damaged ones of dalits in the village and provide one member of each family with...