Caste still decides who does which work and who profits from it, from India's sewers to global tech.
Telangana says it is testing an allegation against a former chief minister. The notices have gone to Dalit families who have farmed Erravalli's assigned land for 60 years.
I am a farmer, without my land I am nothing.
Panchami land left in Tamil Nadu out of the land granted, the state's social justice minister told the Assembly, citing RTI replies.
Investors say an IIT degree speeds up the trust start-up money runs on, and scholars trace that degree to caste advantage. Federal programmes for Dalit founders mostly lend.
Legal protection is the only means to guard the vulnerable from caste exploitation in places where dominant castes have privilege and preponderance.
Of the founders of India's first 100 unicorns, start-ups valued at US$1 billion or more, are IIT graduates.
Shankersinh Vaghela dared reservation's opponents to clean excreta for Rs 50,000 (about US$570) a month. The BJP's reply, that the practice is gone, echoes an official definition the dead don't fit.
They have to mechanise the entire system. More importantly, they have to delink caste from occupation. Families that have been doing this work for generations must be given dignified alternative livelihoods. Until that happens, people will continue entering sewers because they have no other choice.
of the 54,574 sewer and septic-tank workers in towns and cities verified under NAMASTE, the federal scheme for sanitation workers, belong to Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe or Other Backward Class communities: 67.9% Scheduled Caste, 15.7% Other Backward Class and 8.3% Scheduled Tribe.
A field study in two Dalit-majority villages in Maharashtra records caste working in input and crop markets, and argues that India's farm-income policies should name it.
On 25 December 1968, 44 Dalits were burnt alive in a hut in Tamil Nadu after farm workers demanded higher wages. The landlords charged were acquitted. What happened, and why it still matters.
Tests since 2023 find that chatbots and image generators reproduce caste hierarchy. Most are lab tests, not audits of hiring or lending tools in real use in India.
Shankersinh Vaghela dared reservation's opponents to clean excreta for Rs 50,000 (about US$570) a month. The BJP's reply, that the practice is gone, echoes an official definition the dead don't fit.
Telangana convicted in 3.7% of finished trials of crimes against Scheduled Castes in 2024, India in 33.9%. The state's SC/ST Commission reports 9,102 cases in three years and 32 people convicted.
The information ministry asked for cuts, got them, and still hasn't cleared Sanitised Republic for Kerala's documentary festival.
A court found the 2015 massacre of five Dalit men proven beyond doubt, then acquitted all 40 accused. The failure is the investigation's.
Investors say an IIT degree speeds up the trust start-up money runs on, and scholars trace that degree to caste advantage. Federal programmes for Dalit founders mostly lend.
The complaint that reservation crushes merit pictures a vast quota. Government records show a small, shrinking public sector, SC shares that track the population and a private sector no one counts.
The 2013 Act defines a manual scavenger and, separately, hazardous cleaning of sewers and septic tanks. Workers sent into sewers fall between the two, and outside its rehabilitation list.
India's records call these deaths "hazardous cleaning" accidents, never manual scavenging, the caste-bound work a 2013 law banned. The label decides who is counted and who is owed.
The 1982 Tamil novel, read in English as Heat, follows a boy who kills a landowner. It is exact about who pays for that blow, and silent on caste.
Courts in Odisha bailed Dalit and Adivasi accused on condition they sweep a police station. The Supreme Court struck the conditions out as caste-coloured.
Dalit engineers in the US and India describe the same filter: questions that locate caste, referral networks, and reviews that read dominant-caste comfort as merit.
