 Pleasant duty to very briefly welcome you to sow us, especially those of you who have traveled here from far away, to enjoy what some people who have never experienced an Indian summer would like to call an Indian summer, but actually what you've encountered is a very thoroughly English autumn, but we are indoors all day, so that shouldn't bother us too much. We're very happy to host this conference on cast out of the shadows, and very grateful to everybody involved, I think far too many to mention at this juncture, who have worked so hard to make it happen. Just to introduce you very briefly to sow us and the South Asia Institute, but before I do that, may I do the needful and ask you to do the needful with your mobile phones, and only use them please in the breaks between the sessions. Sow us, as I'm sure many of you know, is a university that focuses exclusively on Asia, Africa and the Middle East. We have 18 academic departments in three faculties and four and a half thousand students on campus due to arrive very shortly. Across the departments there are roughly 62 scholars and teachers who focus exclusively on India and South Asia, so our boast is that we have the most extensive and diverse body of academic expertise in the region of any university in the UK, and we have roughly 100 PhD students here also working on South Asian topics. So last year the school moved to establish the new South Asia Institute, which exists to create a multidisciplinary community of sow us based South Asia specialists for postgraduate teaching, research, collaborative research, research training and general outreach. And one of the first things we did was to introduce a new two-year master's programme in intensive South Asian studies with compulsory language training and a semester at an Indian university in the second year. And we're endeavouring to share South Asia expertise at Sow us more widely than we have here. The two unto raise funds for projects, posts and scholarships as we go along. We've had a few modest successes already in our first year of existence. We also have a ridiculously busy events programme. And if you are not already on our mailing list, please do drop us an email to ssaiatsous.ac.uk. You'll find that on the little brochures that are lying around in the reception area. If you would like to receive notices of the various things that go on here, workshops, seminars, talks, film screenings, book launches and so on. The Institute also aims to provide politically neutral space for discussion and debate. And we seek to have an impact on policy and practice as well as the more purely academic world. And I think today's conference is very much in that vein. The topic of today is no doubt contentious in some eyes. But despite decades of affirmative action in the Indian public sector, I think most of us will recognise that patterns of dissent-based and caste-based exclusion and equality persist in many spheres. In the South Asia country I know best, which is Nepal, the state has only recently moved to begin to address these kinds of problems. So I must say we must deal with the world as we find it, not as we would wish it to be. And I look forward to a day of very fascinating and informative debate, at which point I will hand over to Professor David Moss, who is the head of our anthropology department here and well known to all of you, I'm sure, who will introduce the themes of the day and the programme. So David, over to you. Thank you very much, Mike. And welcome to So As Again from me. But particularly on behalf of our collaborators in putting this event on, this is not something that is happening because of So As It's Happening, because of the organisations that are listed inside of the brochure, and we've had a lot of planning and inputs from everybody. So it is a truly collaborative effort. It's an unusual event. It's not an academic conference that you're here for. It's an opportunity for researchers to meet together with policymakers, with practitioners to debate an issue that is of enormous importance today. The significance of caste and caste-based discrimination to poverty, inequality and development. Why this event and why this event now? That's a question I was asked on a radio interview a couple of days ago. When everybody is hailing emerging India in its economic power that's supposed to have uplifted and has, to some extent, millions who face caste oppression, including Dalits, or those sometimes labelled untouchables, is caste really in the shadows, I was asked? Should it be brought out? And these are, of course, important questions. To the first, yes, India has made huge progress in reducing poverty in recent years. But the question is, why is it that as fewer Indians remain poor, more and more of those who do remain poor are Dalits or Adivasis, as Barbara Harris-White has said, and will hear more from Barbara in a while. Why is it, as we'll also hear, that impressive growth has not broken the association of privileged caste with higher status professions and Dalits with manual and casual labour, and that caste inequality is no less in the fastest-growing and wealthiest regions of the country and region? Why are Dalit entrepreneurs largely restricted to running petty shops, working as dealers and so on and find it hard to get credit or business premises or gravitate towards the sort of stigmatised sanitation, leather and recycling industries? When, a few years ago, I began collaborative research on civil society activism and Dalit rights, I met people who insisted on the continuing relevance of caste and the inequality of opportunity, the persisting poverty and unemployment and ill health and low education levels and exclusion from services that were interpreted by them and by groups they worked with and represented as caste discrimination. New research seems to be proving them right. Caste remains a continuing and structural cause of impoverishment and key to the unequalising processes of modern economic growth and development. Caste discrimination is eroded, some would argue, by the forces of capitalism, but the evidence doesn't seem to support that or certainly questions that we need to understand, that we need to ask about the processes involved. We'll hear about Hindu theological and other religious theological schemes of caste, but the emphasis here is that caste has always been an economic organisation. It's part of a changing structure of political economy and not necessarily connected to religion. So why is caste in the shadows? Perhaps in some respects caste is less visible and apparent and explicit as hierarchical and discriminatory forms of practice and interactions than in the past. The forces which make discriminatory practices and ritual untouchability less prevalent, although no means absent are certainly there, just as there are also forces that reinforce caste in various and often unobserved and ununderstood ways and that's again part of what we're here to discuss and better understand. Understand that's to say this paradox that caste and caste discrimination is on the one hand diminishing on the other hand being reinforced and how do we understand that paradox? Barbara will say in her talk and others will address this in other ways that caste has become in a way a hidden regulator of the shadow economy, of the shadow state, of the informal processes that constitute the vast majority of the Indian and South Asian economies. Caste continues to shape opportunities and the social and cultural capital that caste represents, the connections, the mutual insurance, the caste-based labour markets, recruitment systems, typing of trading and markets are all things that we'll learn about in today's presentations and discussions. The purpose then is to gather together researchers and to engage with policymakers and those who are involved in development programs, programming, thinking about poverty reduction and inequality and the intersectionality of caste and gender, which will be a particular theme that we want to address. It's an important time to address this question because in many cases development organisations are turning their back on the issue of caste or maybe even turning their back on India as a whole, which is of course odd given the still large concentration of poverty and disadvantage in the subcontinent. The purpose again of the conference is to encourage engagement and we have presentations in the morning and then in the afternoon we'll have breakout groups and I hope that everybody has signed up to one of the four breakout groups where we'll have some more in-depth discussion to pick up themes and points that have been made in the presentations and an opportunity for people to come express their views, put their questions and pick up some of the more complex and nuanced aspects of this highly complex and difficult question of caste and modern economy, caste development, caste discrimination exclusion and inequality. We want this to be a thoroughly interactive event so please bring everything that you or all your thoughts or your questions to those discussion groups and then we'll have an opportunity for feedback and a final panel in the late afternoon before we have our drinks reception at the end of the day. I think that's all I need to say by way of welcome and I want to hand over now to Professor Thorat. We're extremely fortunate to have Professor Thorat here as our inaugural speaker. Professor Thorat is the chairman of the India Council for Social Science Research, formerly chair of the University Grants Commission of India and more than anybody else has led the discussion, set out the intellectual landscape as it were and been directly active in the policy space that has opened up in discussing caste and forms of economic discrimination. So without further ado, I'd like to welcome Professor Thorat and we're really honoured to have you here and hand over to you. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you very much David for a nice introduction. Well let me congratulate you and the organiser for bringing the issue of caste as an economic organisation and its implication for economic growth and economic outcome in terms of income. This was very necessary because India is facing experiencing a high growth rate and in that context it is necessary that we raise this issue. Well without losing time, I want to focus on caste as an economic organisation. Does it promote growth and fair economic outcome? My appreciation for David is because not that people have not written on economics of caste system but I think he brought and the organiser brought this issue up front in a situation which is important. Well what do I do in another 15 years or so? Three issues. What's the nature of economics of caste? Does caste promote growth, efficiency and fair income distribution? What is the contemporary empirical evidence on its impact on growth, inequality and poverty? I argue that caste economics neither promote growth nor fair distribution of a certain income. If anything caste economy is hampered economic growth and creates inequality and poverty of high proportion of the population and therefore it is a die-functional in outcome. The rest of the presentation will provide the reason as to why I believe so. Well let us talk about economics of caste or its economic feature. Now I would like to discuss this with a theoretically first with reference to the original test, Manusmuti. You can take any other test also but the prime test is Manusmuti and it is with reference to the original test that you can judge the present situation. Ambedkar Day is the composition of Manusmuti somewhere around 885 BC about 2200 years ago and the earliest practice of untouchability and emergence of untouchable as a class or the lit we call is somewhere around 400 AD, 1615 years ago. Caste as an operative customary law continued till later part of the 18th century when property rights were opened up selectively during the British period. Both caste and untouchability is now legally banned by Indian constitution in 1950 but caste persists as a legacy of the past in many forms and sphere and it is this that lead us to the concern as to why we should discuss it. Now the economic feature of the caste system is the following that it involved division of Hindus into five social groups, loosely defined namely Brahmin, Shatriya, Vaishya, Shudra and untouchable or Atishudra with several subcasts within each of these five castes. Five castes are separated and isolated through the code of Indogami, marriage within the caste and occupation or property rights of each caste are fixed by birth without freedom for a change. That's very important. But the location of the occupation or property rights among caste is graded and unequal. To the Brahmin it's a sign teaching performing religious sacrifices and rituals and receiving gift to the Shatriyas the job of defending people to the Vaishyas trade and to Shudra animal husbandry and agriculture and to Atishudra or Dalit or untouchable the service to all the caste above them. With respect to education which is very important three caste namely Brahmin and Shatriya and Vaishya had a right to education Brahmin alone could teach and use knowledge as a profession two caste that Shatriya and Vaishya had a right to education without right to teach or take as a profession Shudra and untouchable did not have the right to education this feature was applicable to all women irrespective of caste. There are two more features I would like to mention that the caste provide for a social mechanism of social ostracism which involves communication, social and economic by-court for deviation from the caste code. What is important at the end is that Hindu religious philosophy moral and ethical provide justification for the caste because caste is supposed to be of a divine origin therefore Ambedkar summarized it that economic relations of work man to work man is constigated by religion and made secret eternal in violet. What are the consequences at a theoretical level? That the caste system is not a free order that's the first thing that we must understand economically is not a free order but based on restriction and I identify crucial three restriction restriction on occupation or property right or economic activity outside one caste restriction on labour and employment outside caste restriction on formal education restriction on social and civic right which I am not discussing because I am focusing on economic features so it's an unfree economic system with a lot of restriction. Now what are the consequences of this unfree economic system? It results into three negative impact one that it turned out to be inefficient use inefficient use of capital and labour distance into for work and efficiency and limited scope for creation of scientific knowledge and technology. Let me take the first that caste creates segmented and imperfect markets in so far as it's distinct the capital mobility and labour. Caste and labour fails to move from low return occupation to high return occupation. Friends you know that the basic foundation of the economic growth of the mainstream economy is the freedom of mobility. Labour moves from low wage occupation to the high wage occupation. Capital moves from low return profession to the high return profession but that is what precisely caste system stops. So imperfect and segmented market bring high efficiency and the equilibrium that we get is less than what the competitive market would allow. The economic outcome will be less. It will be less than what you will get in the competitive situation. Now there are the consequences on ample unemployment but my paper is discussed in detail and it is put on the website by the organiser. It induce involuntary unemployment for the low caste because low caste would like to take any occupation but there are restrictions so involuntary unemployment and the voluntary unemployment for the high caste because they will refuse to take employment or caste is below their dignity. Now efficiency of labour suffer as occupation not based on individual choice and preference and training or capacities task are assigned in advance selected on the caste status of a parent and not on the base of quality. So it suffer in terms of efficiency. Efficiency affected as some occupation categorised as impure and polluting with the low status for person engage in them. So if you take a occupation and it goes down and it affects your work efficiency. There are no job satisfaction in fact constantly provoke people engage in them our son and desire to leave it. The scavenging occupation which reduce the status of a scavenger to a isolated and excluded person. Why should he or she will have interest in that occupation. Disassociate intelligence from work with contain for physical labour and lack of dignity of labour hardly any dignity of physical labour in Hindu economic system. Consequences further reduce supply of quality and skill women resource due to restriction on education on the labouring classes. So it doesn't allow skill to be developed. Formal education only for the studies of Veda in the school. No school for arts and sciences which produce I'm talking of history and theory. No school for arts and sciences which produce merchant and artisan need. So did not in unscientific knowledge as much as you should have and technology needed for high productivity. Now let us come to the inequality. Consequences on inequality. Occupation or property rights being unequal producer inequality in asset ownership employment and education is fairly inequality impact on inequality is quite obvious in the caste system because caste system as a matter of fact based on the principle of inequality. Inequality is its foundation. It creates three classes teaching and defence service for these are the job regular salary good quality job. But it create the property owner class that is the trade agriculture animal husbandry which is with an untouchable labouring class with a slave like relations create massive inequalities. So these are the consequences on inequality. I won't discuss in detail but let us come to the contemporary context now. What evidence do we have? The untouchability and caste is banned legally constitution doesn't recognize the differences of caste and untouchability. So in fact there are two acts which are passed by the Indian government. One is anti-intouchability act of 1955 another was 1989 modified in 2015 very recently by the president government and there are affirmative action policy. Positive side is that Dalit acquired now access to prohibited economic sphere. They own some land they are into business they are into regular salary job they have access to education and so there has been a positive improvement because of opening about property right and education since 1950 and even earlier. But discrimination still persist in some sphere if not all economic spheres continue as a legacy of the past in market and non-market exchange. Discrimination faced by the producer in business in access to input and sale of output in market I didn't write here discrimination is faced in labor and employment. Discrimination in non-market institutions such as education institutions organization engage in delivery of health food and government program related to food nutrition health and public employment. I am not going to discuss the evidence on discrimination is the constraint but in the main lecture which put on the website whole evidence is given how discrimination persist in market and non-market. I am straight away going to the empirical studies which estimate the consequences of discrimination because there is a tendency to deny that cost doesn't have an impact and it doesn't affect growth and income distribution I am giving an evidence of empirical studies by some scholars first on the farmers farmers survey of 2003 million farmers survey now it is another is conducted in 2003 it is not published. The study observed that there is a differences in the productivity and income net income between the schedule cost farmer and the non schedule cost farmer. Some of them may be because of the natural deficiency of input use. But study observed that 36% of observer differences in the net income between schedule cost and the high cost farmer and 64% of differences between schedule cost and other backward cost is accounted by discrimination alone in the input market factor market and in the sale of the produce. For the same data cost inequality account for about 3 to 17% of overall net farm income inequality discrimination results in income losses to the farmer and to the economy as she is saying. Now in the non form sector that is the private entrepeneurs and the detailed ownership pattern has been studied by Bawara very interesting catalog and cartography. Now but her own colleague has produced a wonderful study the lead capital very recently it is published in 2015 my institute and I have done some work on the constraint phase by the non form producers. The following are the constraint you entity take with the content and hostility if you want to open a shop in the village or in urban area there is hostility and a position the moment the cost background is known. Unable to rent or buy physical space as a result locating shop in one cost locality purchases then mainly confined to one cost customer because high cost would not buy from your shop in villages discrimination in hiring of high cost labour a farmer of low cost require labour high cost would not generally buy from your shop or the or the low cost. In initial order for business and in the sale of goods and therefore lower prices discrimination is faced by the entrepeneurs. Threat to invoke cost identity even if you start a business in urban area because your identity is not known cost is not based on colour or rest it is based on the ideology so you are not people do not know you are a Dalit or not but when the person gets to know he will threaten to open the cost identity which will affect yourself. Difficulties in credit and not having an access to social and cost network which is very very important this is a study by my institute and Asim Prakash who brought out it in 2015 very recently marvellous book. Now discrimination account there are studies now on wages discrimination account in 2005 about 40% and in 2012 about 24% wage differential wage differential could be because of the skill and productivity but about 40% in and 24% is attributed to the discrimination by the forward cost in private sector. Discrimination account for a large part of earning differences in regular salary in urban area with job discrimination being more important than wage discrimination . Just 15 days before marvellous book observed that in 1994 at least one third of the average differences between high cost was due to the unequal treatment of discrimination in market and many other areas. Ten years later in 2005 significant disparity in income and in poverty attributed to social exclusion. This is the National Council of Applied Economics panel data. Now consequences of inequality and I end I think within 5 minutes. Now consequences of inequality of obvious the untouchable did not have right to property, they did not have right to education and therefore they remain wage labor and it can be very well seen by the contemporary statistic despite the fact that property right will open maybe some year up for 150 years or so. In 2012 in rural area this is national sample survey data. Only 22% of SC were self-employed farmers that they own land as against 45% for higher cost and 42% for other backward cost. About 14% of SC also operate enterprises and business non-form with 19% for higher cost but in urban area the difference is larger. In urban area 31% of SC were private entrepreneurs or engaged in business non-form. In urban area 31% for higher cost. We have an economic sense of private enterprises Barbara has book on that. In 2005 the share of SC in the total enterprises in the country was only 10% compared with 42% for higher cost and about similar or little less than that compared to OBC. As a result of lack of access to land and non-lander set wage labor account in case of SC compared with 22% for higher cost in rural area and 22% for share of SC as against 7% for higher cost in urban area. You can see that they continue to be predominantly wage laborer the consequences of past not having access to asset. Higher education restriction very there on higher education I am not giving the school figure the higher education enrollment rate in 2008 was average for India was 17% it was 12% for share of SC as against 27% for higher cost unemployment rate 7% for SC and 5% for higher cost and there are lot more disparity if you go by age and education level. If you take now the final outcome the income and the poverty if you take income which is we take normally the expenditure monthly per capita expenditure which is a close substitute of income in India average is 1646 rupees and you can very easily see as we the high cost is 2239 and it goes down to 11 1123 for the share of tribe and slightly better for share of cost. The hierarchical nature and the graded characteristic of cost system is very clearly reflected in the monthly per capita expenditure and that reflect in poverty then if your income is low you can't buy food as much as you can buy so poverty in 2012 12% for higher cost 25% OBC other backward cost 30% for share of cost and 43% for share of tribe now all in the average being 23 you can see again the graded inequality share of cost and share of tribe being at the lowest society so graded inequality in income and poverty is clear let me make final point now cost economy is hamper economic growth and the cost economy is even and sufficient empirical one has to estimate in fact we have estimated for FAO that what will be the income loss loss in a farm income on account of discrimination and which result into less access to input net income is reduced gross income in farm is reduced so there is a particular loss to the economy so economic cost economy is hamper economic growth and low human development for Dalit and similar group and it produce inefficient outcome in terms of economic growth and income distribution therefore policies to provide legal safeguard and market discrimination and affirmative action policy for providing equal access are invitable to promote growth and reduce poverty in the private sector the point is that we have an affirmative action policy very strong which is confined to public sector which account 10% of the total employment in the country 90% of the employment is in private sector there is hardly any affirmative action policy there there is some sort of an affirmative action policy which was accepted in developing 2008 by Dr. Manmohan Singh and the Confederation of Indian industry but it is voluntary and self-regulatory out of the 9000 member of the CII Confederation of industry only 800 or affirmative action policy which account only 12% of the total member of CII so you can see that voluntary and self-regulatory system doesn't work well these are the main point that I wanted to share with you but in the discussion we can take many more thank you very much so we now have an opportunity to people to put questions to Professor Thorat and to have some engagement discussions so if we could have hands or anybody who'd like to sorry oh yes I should mention that the sessions are being recorded and obviously we will be editing these and making some of these available publicly so just to inform people that this is a recorded event so questions queries or points we have a question over there maybe we should take a couple if there's anybody else with a question waiting nope okay we'll start with this question do you want to just respond to that briefly while people collect further questions the affirmative action policy in India what is popularly known as a reservation policy is in three areas one is in politics that of the total member of the parliament about 15% are from the schedule cost and 8% from schedule trade fixed number second is the government employment in proportion to population third is the reservation and quotas in the education institution government education institutions these are the three prime areas but as you rightly said are there other efforts on the other areas yes indeed but there are informal policies they are not legally binding for example there is a corporation for schedule cost and schedule trade which provide capital and loan to set up the private enterprises housing in all public housing definite quota for the schedule cost and schedule trade there are several other areas we have economic plan there is a special component plan for schedule cost and schedule trade that out of the 100 pound that you spend on in the 5 year period 16 pound and 8 pound must be spent on schedule cost and schedule trade in some state it is made legal now there is a act and that includes expenditure on the civic amenities like water road sanitation in the localities of the schedule cost because their localities are away from the high cost so often road doesn't go electricity wire doesn't go there tap water remain in the high cost locality so special component plan was created that this facility should be provided in the localities so I think in informal way the affirmative action policy address many sphere where they are they are lacking that is what the government of India did but in many areas it is expanded I think I would submit that for female particularly we have an informal affirmative action policy which is very strong I am going to take a question at the back okay I think it is a very interesting question as I said that the affirmative action policy is not applicable to the private sector in legal term in voluntary and self regulatory form it has come in 2008 and I have told you this level of acceptance but as far as the laws are concerned I think the laws are concerned we can begin with the constitution and constitution say that it ensured equal status opportunity and facility irrespective of caste creed gender ethnicity religion so to that extent constitution at least in law and at least in promises guarantee the citizens and also put an obligation on the state to pass laws to ensure it that is one level which is overarching provision under which then we have two laws the anti untouchability act which was passed in 1955 we must say I must say that the untouchability is banned in the constitution itself it is a very important provision but the act was passed in 1955 called anti untouchability act which was renamed as a protection of civil rights act later on in 1989 now this act provides an equal access to the civil caste to the several public sphere it does talk about private but private is not strictly speaking covered but public sphere it also talks about discrimination in employment it talks about discrimination in business in a very very subtle manner not very very clearly therefore to that extent there is no clear clarity and there is no separate law of discrimination in employment discrimination in businesses discrimination in many other areas for the private sector that is why there is a demand that there has to be an affirmative action policy for private sector but legally they demanded legal policy with private sector did not accept finally midway through the middle ground what I choose that is voluntary and affirmative action policy there is another act called prevention of atrocity act because the discrimination is spread and so so much exist on a day-to-day basis and it takes various forms verbal abuse, physical abuse and therefore anti-intrigibility act was not adequate enough and therefore government brought another act in 1989 and it called prevention of atrocities in a way violence against the civil caste by the high caste and 23 behaviour of the high caste are considered to be atrocious and are subject to punishment and they include social sphere but there is hardly any reference to the private sector so I must say that we don't have a clear legislation or law for discrimination in employment and in the entrepreneurs and in the business as such and we need that although there are loose provisions under which you can take protection but I have not seen a single case in land 60 year by the Dalit who went to the court because they were discriminated in employment so I think 90% of the employment is in private sector so that is why there is an issue when in early 90s we brought in new policy of privatization as a reserve the sphere for which the reservation is applicable got reduced substantially the in-demanded reservation in private sector that was the reason but I think as far as clear cut answer to your question is that it is very important that there are no people at the chairing. And we have a presentation from Professor Ashwini Dashpande, then Professor Barbara Harris White, and then Dr. Ramesh Naran. So if the speakers would kindly come up or maybe be near the vicinity if you want to see the presentations that are going before, I'll hand over. Is Mina here? Thank you very much. David, I should go down. Yes, then you'll be able to see more of the presentation. Thank you very much indeed. Well, good morning everyone. Welcome to the first plenary session of this conference, which is cast in today's world. My panel has the dubious honour of having to follow that excellent keynote presentation, but I know having read through all their biographies and knowing them personally, they're more than up to the challenge. But firstly, my name is Mina Varma. I'm the director of the Dalit Solidarity Network and one of the co-organisers of this conference. DSN UK is part of an international campaign to end cast discrimination worldwide. We're part of the International Dalit Solidarity Network, and that that organisation leads on lobbying and advocacy campaigns, both at the UN and the EU. Please do take some time if you can during the breaks to have a word with Ricky, who's the executive director of the International Dalit Solidarity Network. Find out more about their work. DSN also is one of the leading UK organisations in the campaign to end cast discrimination. We do it by lobbying the UK Parliament, both at home and abroad, to address discrimination against Dalit, both at home and abroad. Because in the UK we are so close and yet so very far still from having equality legislation implemented to address cast discrimination, which has been researched and very evident here in the UK as well. Lastly, DSN is a member of the Ethical Trading Initiative, and in that particular capacity we address cast discrimination in supply chains, specifically throughout India. And we do have a very successful programme, which is addressing the issue of Samangali, which is the forced labour of young girls in the textile mills throughout Tamil Nadu. So, on to my speakers. First off, we have Ashwini Deshbande. She is a Professor of Economics at the Delhi School of Economics at the University of Delhi in India. Her PhD and early publications have been on the international debt crisis of the 1980s, also on the aspects of the Chinese economy. Subsequently, she has been working on the economics of discrimination and affirmative action issues with a focus on cast and gender in India. She has published extensively in leading scholarly journals and is the author of Grammar of Cast, Economic Discrimination in Contemporary India and Affirmative Action in India. She has also received the Exim Bank Award for Outstanding Dissertation, now called the IERA Award in 1994 and the 2007 VKRV Rao Award for Indian Economist. Ashwini's presentation analyses the contemporary nature of caste disparities and discrimination in various spheres of the Indian economy. Ashwini, I'm going to introduce all the speakers. My second speaker is Barbara Harris-White. Barbara drove from Cambridge to New Delhi in 1969 to climb in the Himalayas and has been researching and teaching India's political economy ever since. Her fields are twofold. First, the rural and informal capitalist economy. Her latest book is Middle India and Urban Rural Development, Four Decades of Change. And second, the deprivation of victims of capitalist transformation. After the latest research after the project on Dalits and Advances in the business economy that she will talk about, which is about the social relations of waste in India and the fastest growing waste producer in the world. She is Emeritus Professor of Development Studies at Oxford and was founded director of the EMMAFIL in Development Studies 1996 and the world's first masters in contemporary India 2008. Barbara will present on the regional patterns of entry of Dalits and advices into the Indian economy as owners of firms and how difficult it is to explain why the different sectors of the economy make different spatial patterns or geographical regions. Finally, we will hear from Dr. Ramesh Nathan, who has been a Dalit human rights activist and organizer for the past three decades. Hailing from Tamil Nadu, he has successfully immobilized Dalits and led campaigns for their housing rights, education, political representation and access to justice. In the past six years, Ramesh has played a key role in mobilizing more than 600 Dalit and advices civil society organizations under the banner of the National Coalition for Strengthening SCs and STs Prevention of Atrocities Act. He is the convener of this nationwide platform. Presently, he is the general secretary of the National Dalit Movement for Justice under the National Campaign for Dalit Human Rights. The primary focus is on ensuring justice for Dalit and Advasi communities through legal interventions, through a network of Dalit human human activists, taking forward the caravan of Dalit movements to deepen democracy and challenge impunity at multiple levels. Numerous and new forms of car space atrocities have been identified in contemporary India as perpetrated in both rural and urban regions. These forms are widespread and systemic in nature. Ramesh will talk to us about the changing nature and context of atrocities on Dalits and why we need to rethink our solidarity strategies. I'm going to ask each speaker to try and stick to 10 minutes. Will it be a little bit flexible? Not too much. There will be plenty of time at the end of all the presentations for audience participation, so I'll take all comments and questions after the speakers have presented. So without further ado, Ashwini, please. Thank you very much. Thank you, David, for inviting me to this very important event. And it's a privilege for me to share the floor with so many distinguished scholars and practitioners on this question. So I'm going to try my best to stick to 10 minutes. So the context is well known. And what I want to explore in this presentation is how the contemporary nature of economic inequalities within the caste system, how that is changing. So one view that one hears a lot in the academia and also from journalists is that the caste system, of course, is a very old system that exists. And you see inequalities by caste, but they're primarily a hangover of the past. So the basic argument is that it's an old and dying system. So yes, you do see inequalities presently, but these are basically a hangover of what inequalities existed as a result of the persistent, as a result of the persistent discrimination and barriers that were explained earlier by Professor Thorath in the keynote address. So for example, one argument has been that there's been rapid economic growth and expansion of the middle class. There have been new opportunities for individual mobility and a further loosening of the association between caste and occupation. It has also been argued that on the whole, caste consciousness in India is dying down. Some academics have argued that what you have today is not necessarily a dying down of caste consciousness, but what you have is an assertion of caste identity that is not hierarchical. So these are individual castes asserting their own versions of hierarchy. So you don't see the old style hierarchy being articulated in India today. It's all about which caste asserts its presence and dominance at what point in time. And all you have is a contestation between alternative visions of hierarchy. So you don't really have that old fashioned way of hierarchies that you saw earlier. The most recent turmoil in India on the question of reservations, which has been very much in the news, has been the agitation by a caste group that has actually been very wealthy in Gujarat. And the interesting thing is that this is a caste group that actually opposed the system of affirmative action or reservations in the 1985 anti-reservation riots in Gujarat. So this question was raised yesterday in the event at the UCL. So these were agricultural fairly low, not Dalits, but fairly low agricultural caste countries. Several of them migrated to East Africa, became wealthy and acquired a name called Patidar, which is a kind of a gentrified name. And today, in 2015, are on the streets demanding quotas, the very instrument that they had opposed 20 years earlier. And so the question is, why do we see this phenomenon? I'm not going to talk today about the petty legislation because that is a very specific instance and we can talk about that during the question and answers. But the question that we need to, that this episode raises for us is that could it be that the, of course, the famous Gujarat model of growth, and more widely the Indian model of growth, could it be that it is actually not inclusive such that even the traditionally, or not traditionally, perhaps, if you go back 200 years, but traditionally, if you certainly go back the last 50 or 60 years, wealthy communities and wealthy caste groups also have seen a differentiation within them that they feel the need to articulate a demand for reservations or quotas. And if a wealthy caste, an overall wealthy caste group such as Patil is demanding quotas, what do we make about, what can you say about the economic, the economic disparities between the topmost caste groups and the bottommost who are the Dalits? So if Patil, or a section of the Patil feels left out and not included, what do you say about the traditionally marginalized communities such as the Chadiul caste and tribes? So I have been working with large scale data sets and I believe that we really need an evidence-based assessment. So I have an evidence-based assessment to look at the contemporary nature of caste disparities. And for example, the government of India conducted a socioeconomic caste census, but they're not releasing the data on the caste disparities. But this would have been a time when that data actually could have been quite helpful for us to look at what the nature of disparities between Patil's and other higher caste groups within Gujarat are, not to mention the gaps between Dalits and upper caste. But the point that the Patil agitation highlights is actually a greater need to focus or focus on evidence-based assessments of caste inequalities. It's not a question of your view versus mine. It's a question of what the data are telling us. And some of that evidence is what I'm going to talk about in today's presentation. Now, a lot of the debate about the continuing relevance of caste in modern India has to do about the degree of change and about whether caste and occupation are still as aligned as they used to be in the early stages of the caste system. And the disassociation or the association between caste and occupation is seen as a measure of the degree of change within the caste system. And those who believe that the caste system is dying down or is no longer relevant, basically argue that caste is no longer a predictor of occupation in contemporary India today. And that's why they argue that caste is not a relevant system, a relevant lens to look at economic disparities today. So my response to that argument is twofold. One, if we look at the traditional caste-based occupations that exist, have survived economic change in that existent contemporary India, who performs them now? Are these performed by the same groups to which they were allocated from the beginning of the caste system or have these changed? Secondly, if you look at the modern occupations that do not have a natural caste counterpart, are these allocated purely on the basis of merit or ability? In other words, do we not see any overlap between caste and status or caste and privilege? Is it or is it not? That's something that evidence will tell us. Is it or is it not the case that the better-paying, more prestigious modern jobs are disproportionately occupied by the upper castes and the worse-paying, less prestigious modern jobs are disproportionately occupied by the Dalits and Adivasis? If that is the case, then even though in the traditional sense we don't see a strict association between caste and occupation, in a way that should be trivial because the modern occupational spectrum is continuously evolving, new and newer types of jobs are coming up, which don't directly have a caste counterpart. There was never a caste of nuclear scientists. There was never a caste of graphic web designers. So the point is that if you take it in a very trivial sense, yes, of course the association between caste and occupation has broken down, but that's not the right way to look at it. What we need to do is to map the modern occupational spectrum with which caste groups perform which kinds of jobs in the modern occupational spectrum. That's the right way to answer this question and not just look at the trivial dissociation between caste and occupation. So of course one can talk a lot about that, but I'm going to try to be brief. So in one of my decent studies with co-author Rajesh Ramachandran, what we did was we looked at NSS data, national sample survey data, for two periods in time separated by a decade and looked at three large groups, the schedule caste and schedule tribes, the other backward classes and others which is the non-SCST OBC category. Now as you perhaps know that in the large-scale macro data, these are the categories that one has to work with. You don't have data by Jati yet, so these are the large groups that one has to work with. And we have to understand that these are omnibus categories containing within themselves a great deal of heterogeneity. So they actually mask a lot of heterogeneity within themselves. But the advantage of these large omnibus categories is that comparison across categories becomes simple. But the implication of the fact that these are heterogeneous categories is the following. That if you could isolate the bottom most Dalits from within the schedule caste category and for example the Brahmins in the others category, the actual gap would be larger than what the gap that we see with these omnibus categories. Because the others categories includes not only the top most end of the upper caste but also cast that are fairly lower. It's just that they don't happen to be administratively categorized as either schedule casts, schedule tribes or other backward classes. Because this group others is a basically residual heterogeneous that's everybody else. That's the category, that's the others. So if we could isolate the top end of the others, we would be able to see the full extent of disparity which we can't see when these heterogeneous categories. And what we did was we looked at, we divided these groups by the year of birth into birth cohorts and we tried to do what in technical terms is called difference in differences which is basically looked at older cohorts of these three groups and younger cohorts of these three groups and try to see whether the gaps between the younger cohorts and the older cohorts are increasing or decreasing. So if the gaps between the younger cohorts of these large groups are larger than the gaps between the older cohorts of these three large groups then there is divergence. The groups are moving further away. Disparities are widening. And since I am running out of time basically what we find is for example in the white collar jobs we find that there is divergence between OBCs and others for the older cohorts but when you come to the youngest OBCs and the youngest others you actually see them converging together but we don't see this convergence between schedule cars, schedule drives and others which means that for all this talk of economic growth and new kinds of occupations avenues for mobility etc we don't actually find a convergence between cars groups in major economic dimensions. We have also estimated labour market discrimination. I will skip this slide because Professor Thorath already talked about this. There are other kinds of evidence which look at Professor Thorath himself has done a study of sending identical resumes with different last names and trying to see employer hidden you know employer discrimination through that I have done a study of college to work which looks at the kind of discriminatory tendencies that employers have in the urban formal sector Indian labour markets. So these are not traditional rural jobs where employers are kind of motivated by some sort of primitive caste consciousness. These are very very much in the in the formal sector modern jobs and this is actually not surprising because in the private sector we find that the role of networks informal and personalised recruitment who you know is often more important and than what you know and Dalits and the Adivasis are severely disadvantaged in this in this regard. I'm again not spend a whole lot of time to talk about self-employment because I know Barbara is going to talk about businesses but I actually have two papers recently looking at small businesses by Dalits, Adivasis and everybody else and I directly address a question which has been actually gaining prominence in India which is on the question of Dalit capitalism and whether that can be a panacea you know a kind of a solution to end a caste inequality because we have an organisation in India called the Dalit Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry who believe that Dalit should become capitalist and be job givers and not job seekers not rely on the government to give take jobs through quotas this will help them to rise to the top of the social pyramid and end the caste system. The broad evidence on this is that while there is a group of Dalit millionaires that's emerged and that's their success is actually quite striking given all the odds that they've had to overcome in order to establish their businesses the large part of Dalit businesses is not in that space at all most of them are very low productivity bottom of the chain survivalist activities and are at the moment not in a position to act as job givers and so and I've also looked at earnings gaps between Dalit businesses and non-Dalit businesses and documented the discriminatory part of the earnings gaps discrimination that comes from sources that Professor Thorat was talking about earlier it could be credit market discrimination it could be land market discrimination it could be consumer discrimination all of these act to explain a part of the wage earnings gap between Dalit businesses and non-Dalit businesses finally I'll just take one extra minute to talk about a study which is actually forthcoming in the next year in 2016 where we looked at an experiment we did an experiment on the internet looking at charitable giving and whether these are internet using English speaking urban Indians and asked them to donate of an amount a small amount to to individuals who were named versus to charities that work for certain groups so we we used Dalit names upper caste names Muslim names and generic Indian names which people couldn't place and with each of these we had counterparts for generic charity so as opposed those individuals who were given Dalit names there was half individuals who were giving given the option to vote to donate to a charity that would donate to to Dalits and the effect that we wanted to test in this study was isn't as well is well known in the social psychology literature literature as the statistical or identified victim effect which is that individuals tend to donate more to identified individuals rather than statistical or generic causes and we find that for all other caste groups we actually find that individuals donated more to the named victim as opposed to the statistical charity except for Dalits they were willing to donate more to the Dalit charities but when an individual Dalit was named their donations fell okay and so we have explanations in the paper about why that me why that might be but one of the explanations could be that very very individuals are not seen as eligible for human sympathy and people are unwilling to help identified victims who are seen as responsible for their own situation the point about this study being that caste consciousness I believe is alive and thriving in contemporary India it's not old it's not dying and it's not a hangover from the past and yes there have been new opportunities due to globalization and liberalization but I believe that upper class have been disproportionately benefiting from these new opportunities several sections of the SCST and some OBC communities as we need you to wrap up deficient in basic skills needed to take advantage of the new opportunities and so caste continues to mediate economic outcomes and asserts its presence in society and politics today thank you and apologies okay thank you I'd like to now welcome professor Barbara Harris white hello everybody it's very exciting to be here today and it's a great privilege to be on the podium I've been asked to talk about Dalits and Adivasis even more in the shadows in the business economy knowing that the business economy consists of 95 percent of firms with under five employees this may surprise you if you read the business press in India or the business pages of the quality English press which is all about the corporate sector but India's economy is dominated by tiny firms and it expands by multiplication of these firms rather than rags to riches even though we can all find examples of rags to riches and it may surprise you that between 1990 and 2005 the average number of employees in an Indian firm fell from 2.9 to 2.4 so that's what we're talking about when we talk about the Indian economy despite all the achievements that professor Thorat and professor Deshpande talked about and confident predictions not just from professor Bethe but prime minister Nehru Swedish economy economists Gunamir Dal onwards that either markets the animal spirits or the rationalities of states or liberalization would liberate the economy from the archaic arrangements that we're talking about today still Dalits and adivasis occupy the lowest rungs and they have the poorest chances of social mobility as Ashwini just explained now they have fewest choices and persistent stigma and they're mainly positioned as labor and here is where they're mostly employed in agriculture you can see these well-nourished people at the bottom of the caste hierarchy in Tamil Nadu and they work disproportionately in the waste economy which is something that India is now choking in but doesn't seem to see and they work in sanitation work I did not take the picture on the bottom left it comes from the internet but all the others I encountered in my field work in February and you can see the magnificent modern high-tech equipment that is used to clean the streets and ensure that the general waste which includes human waste these days although human manual scavenging has been abolished was abolished in the early 90s still isn't completely abolished what happens in little towns where only half the houses have septic tanks is that it joins the general solid waste and it has to be cleared up by the municipal sanitation workers so they are disproportionately but not completely Dalit and Adivasi and here is an Irlu lady Irlars in Tamil Nadu have a particular culture they're multiply evicted they're permanently transient and they live like this and here they are very hard work again on the bottom left that's 20 kilos of plastic but very hard work before dawn and as you've already gathered from the way I'm describing their work as labor we can see that class and caste and ethnicity and gender and places of origin and the informal practices of the state outside its own reach which I haven't showed you in photos are regulators of most of the Indian economy including labor arrangements and as Ashwini and Professor Torrat just explained and all the arrangements in non-labor markets money markets inputs commodities products all are structured even now even in the 21st century through caste and ethnicity and as Ashwini said it's not as though these archaic institutions are being easily dissolved and it's not as though nothing has happened is happening either it's both things are happening simultaneously so I don't think social science I don't think researchers have actually managed to theorize very satisfactorily the conditions under which contradictory processes occur more or less in the same place how can it be that in some sectors like the bilai steel plant that Johnny Perry studies that Brahmins and schedule caste people work on the same production line and yet in the industrial estate providing spare components to that plant there is a very strong caste occupational structure and the same applies to the town where everybody goes to buy their food and their consumer goods afterwards so the balance of forces between forces dissolving caste and forces reinforcing caste or resisting the dissolution of caste is always localized it means it has huge implications for research and we need more and more local understandings of what is going on and generally it's theorized what is going on is theorized as what is going on to labor and I just want to follow up what Ashwini has so very well introduced to you by asking the question how do they fare as owners of small businesses and here they are this is infectious medical waste these slides come from Sarah Hodges who did a brilliant study of biotrash in Chennai all work for Dalits here we are in fruit and vegetables which Dalits can sell because they will be peeled or cooked their surfaces won't be contaminated will be blocked by a process of transformation before people consume them and you can see how squashed these Dalit stalls are against the sides of permanent shops in a small town again in Tamil Nadu squashed between the motorbikes and the bikes and the permanent shops this is in the Himalayas just to show you that women can be traders too and that women in the Himalayas suffer no stigma from trading in liquor so the relationship is not always one we might predict as outsiders Dalits disproportionately confined to butchery and selling meat and here is a tribal lady selling cheese from the back of her wonderful backpack and again gunny bags things which get dirty are disproportionately low cast okay so what we have done is taken a different perspective on something which you've already learned from the other two distinguished speakers about the unevenness of the incorporation of Dalits and Adivasas as owners of firms and what we have done is map the regions of relative disadvantage and advantage in the incorporation of Dalits and Adivasas into the business economy business in scare quotes because as I explained these firms are very small we think of business as corporates these days but I'm not talking about the corporate economy at all first maps are of on the left the distribution of schedule cast population in the total population by districts so you can see that schedule casts are not evenly distributed over India there's a disproportionate concentration in the north in the maps that I'm going to show you dark is more okay and light is less so it's quite easy to understand very few in the northeast for instance which I want to park and in good luck because you will see the patterns that are going to emerge and if you come from India do keep a look out on your state of or your family's state of origin because the patterns are very specific the balance of forces are local on the right is the map of the percentage of schedule cast enterprises in total enterprises that were mapped by the economic census in 2005 so there's a difference between the proportion of Dalits the only part of India where the proportion of Dalits in the population and in the population of firms is in Orissa and parts of West Bengal that are happily slightly brown otherwise the proportion of Dalits in firms is less than the proportion of Dalits in the population that's what those maps show and here you have instances of either high proportion or low proportion and there again you see very clearly that the northern area and the southern area which have a high proportion of Dalit Dalits in the population have a low proportion in the business economy and you see the northeast beginning to appear as a zone of liberation for Dalits who managed to get there and as I said earlier Orissa and West Bengal are roughly at par okay we can ignore that that's simply the formula it's quite easy to understand what we did with that data on population and firms is we made a very simple indicator where the proportion of Dalit enterprises to total enterprises is divided by the proportion of Dalits in the population to the total population and the merit of that indicator is its simplicity because one means roughly equal under one means discriminated against if you like disproportionately disadvantaged and over one means disproportionately advantaged okay come on so this is the these are the patterns that are made all enterprises end up with a funny kind of shape which I want you to keep in your minds because the patterns are so different and yet the main pattern for schedule cast and schedule trides is rather similar look at the northeast and mountains if you get there you have a disproportionate advantage in trade or at least you're able to set up in trade and really I want because time is at a premium let's look at the the details on the bottom row because look at construction there it's a kind of patchy it's say it doesn't regionalize in a way that agriculture and non-agriculture themselves regionalize zones of advantage in the north and zones of disadvantage surprisingly in the south of india construction has advantages you can say Dalits have advantages for construction or construction has advantages for Dalits all over India except perhaps in the deep south but look at hotels and restaurants traditionally associated with Brahmins pretty much disadvantaged all over India except for the northeast and again finance and business a huge disadvantage to Dalits except in in the northeast and we'll do the same with tribal people there's a kind of big dumbbell I don't mean it in a nasty way but here this is the pattern which harks back in a much more distinctive way to the pattern of distribution of Dalit in the population population of Adivasis is very strongly concentrated in central India and the same is true with firms so there's a much closer congruence of the absolute number of firms and the absolute number of Adivasis people okay so then when we start looking at that ratio I described where on these maps darkest is better and yellow lighter yellows are worse we find a very strange setting enduring patterns and because it's closest to me let me look let me show you here what we draw around Mumbai and in Kerala and the foot of Tamil Nadu because you find these blotches coming out whatever the sector of the economy is that you're you're trying to map so the destruction again is much more evenly distributed and much more patchy but hotels and restaurants we have UP where actually there were very few tribal people but a lot of tribal enterprise what is going on what is going on in the deep south and on the west coast so that's my story really schedule casts and schedule tribes have been conflated in a lot of analysis especially by the tribe of economists but actually very different processes of incorporation are going on between 1990 and 2005 the latest data the disadvantage of schedule cast seemed to have intensified and spread particularly in the south which we don't really expect and schedule tribal advantage has spread and intensified from the east coast and these coastal blotches in land but from a very low base and we've heard a lot about pro-poor growth but nobody has ever told this story of pro-poor growth of tribal people in the non-farm economy the incorporation of both Dalits and Adivasis makes several coherent but different regions and reservations don't seem to have much of an impact on those public services that we could map so we try to explain it through economics and through politics so we try to figure out whether there are associations between Dalits in business quotes and urbanization are towns liberating for Dalits education does it require education where Dalits have more education do they do better land holdings are Dalit land holdings a springboard for investing in business the relative density of Dalit populations does it matter for setting up in business I suppose we're proxying for social networks and then lastly poverty does that matter and at the state level none of these heroic attempts to try to explain the patterns of Dalit businesses really produced any significant results just two minutes Barbara I'll reach the end so human development in the form of education had a different impact on Dalits and on Adivasis and lagged literacy amongst scheduled tribal people helped them to seems to have helped them enter petty services okay so we need to know much more about the relationship between agriculture and the chances for these groups in the non-farm economy politically we looked at the regions that we found and we related them to an attempt to regionalize pro-poor politics in India and what we found was that our regions and the regions of pro-poor politics don't match they don't match so something else is going on and I think pro-poor politics is using data that doesn't discriminate for schedule castes and schedule tribes and so the take home message from that is that the incorporation political incorporation of schedule castes and schedule tribes is different and it doesn't it isn't covered well by calling them lumping them together and calling them pro-poor okay so this is my final slide I think research is urgently needed on Dalits and Adivas as differentiated and as gendered especially the question of whether the entry barriers to different sectors of the non-farm economy are either economic or social or both and why there is such regional variation and because I work in the field and in microeconomics clearly I feel that the work could start with looking at India block by block looking at the rural non-farm economy and also looking at the needs of business for Dalit human development will there be better chances of the sort that Ashwini was talking about if employers can recruit all the labour from their comfort zone from their social comfort zone so we have to look at the need for human development as well as the supply of human development and then we can use this experience of mapping to derive lessons for institutional change what is the opposition the hostility the enemies of Dalit entry into the business economy I'll leave it there thank you thank you very much and finally moving on to our last speaker Dr. Ramesh Naravan thank you Jaybeem Jaybeem Friends first and foremost I would like to appreciate all the organizers for having organized this conference addressing the cost and cost based issues because the issue of cost it is not only the issue of India it has become a global issue the cost cost based discrimination has been witnessed in almost all the Asian countries in many part of the global and there has been larger context and the international communities have a major role to play towards alienation of this cost as our Ambedkar Dr. Ambedkar said let me start with a positive note that based on our last 15 years experience monitoring of Dalit human rights particularly the atrocities against Dalit and Adivasi communities trying to access the criminal justice system for the victims and surveyors and this experience from the ground level has been culminated as national coalition for strengthening of Shedilkar Shediltai Priyamsah atrocities act which is the progressive welfare act and that is the only act which protects the rights of Dalit and Adivasi and with all our collective effort and this act through amendments it has been recently passed in the Lok Sabha that is lower house of the parliament and yet to be passed in the Raj Sabha in the upper house of the parliament I take these opportunities to all those who have been supported this campaign last six years particularly Christian Aid Bread for the World the Dalit Saldaat in Etowak DSN, EK IDS and many others this is one of the major effort in order to strengthen your policies in addressing these issues this is the I mean my presentation focus on the changing nature and context of atrocities on Dalit and need for re-strategizing of solidarity the detailed paper has been distributed I think let me try to summarize through some of these slides which focus on mainly the newer forms of atrocities and also the need for re-strategizing and as my previous speakers mentioned that the Indian constitution 1950 Article 17 is prohibits the untouchability practice and practice of any forms which is a punishable offense and similarly the Shadilkar Shadiltai Priyamsa of atrocities act 1899 which also prevents the atrocities but despite more than 150 forms of untouchabilities have been practiced obviously in the rural area and very subtle form in the urban areas and various forms of atrocities are committed against Dalits over the last 15 years there has been increase the the atrocities or the crime against Dalit communities which has been rampant in the recent past it is mainly partly that we consider due to the increase of assertion among the Dalit communities the claiming the rights of Dalits empowerment and the resisting against injustice so due to this there has been various forms of atrocities are rampant in the recent past and if you look at the statics of the national crime bureau record from 2001 to 2012 you can see 370,234 crimes are committed against Dalits of which 15,917 the issues or the atrocities later to rape against Dalit women and so many Dalits were murdered 7,900 49,514 Dalits were brutally attacked severely injured and 159,692 other forms of atrocities that is mass atrocities burning of Dalit houses and so on of which only 33 percentage of the cases are filed under the SCST prevention of atrocities side which means a lot of cases still not been reported and if you look at the conviction rate during this period which is less than 10% and the Dalit women continue to face multiple forms of operation I think as are going to cover elaborately but just give you a kind of picture the various forms of atrocities are committed against Dalits women and these are the forms of atrocities you can see some of the pictures the newer forms of discrimination atrocities we have witnessed in the recent past number one is there has been systematic discrimination violence against Dalit children in the educational institutions and discrimination higher education we need to we need to admit that the so far in our monitoring of Dalit human rights we are not really focused on the educational institutions accepting some of the issues where there has been discriminations in the higher educations but if you look at the school education there are there is there has been many forms of discriminations are taking place including internal marking cost abuse physical violence abuses inside outside the education institutions the number two is the discrimination atrocities against Dalit women similarly there has been rampant on various context and also the Dalit women have been murdered on the pretext of the practicing witchcrafts this is also one of the newer forms that recently we have witnessed then as many of the my previous panelists mentioned about the discrimination market we are nowhere in the market still we are in the peripheral levels but still we have been forced to do all traditional degrading polluting occupations and no access for the fair prices shops also in the villages there has been many discriminations forced labor in the textile industries forced labor in the rural based industries like bricklaying rice meals and so many things and also in the sanitary workers in the in the municipalities and corporations and still the reservation policies have been denied in the private sector it has been very well addressed already and the mass violence are taking place in order to weaken the economic conditions of Dalits this is one of the recent past previously witnessed the individual attack individual murder individual cases but recent past there has been mass attack on Dalit communities because the people who have been over the period of time who have built some of the assets being completely burnt and looted by the non-Dalits in order to weaken the economic status so as to they will go back to the zero 10 years 20 years back and whatever the money hard earned and been completely destroyed by the non-Dalit communities then denial of state resources for the development of Dalits there has been many schemes many resources been allocated particularly the schedule cost supplement the grant that to been allocated based on the population it's all in the paper and mostly it is not been properly allocated and it not been properly implemented almost all those someones have been spent for the common development of the people it is not going to the economic development or infrastructure development of the Dalit communities then discrimination the distribution of wages under the what you call employment guarantee site this has been implemented but there has been very systematic exclusion discrimination in terms of wages and distribution of wages the honor killing I mean I don't call it as honor killing it is cost-pride killing but for many people they use this term but there has been in the recent past due to inter-cost marriages the Dalits are within the cost the young women or young boys have been killed due to the cost-pride then denial of basic natural resources which is in the villages it's very systematic exclusions violence and discrimination the local government in the local government during the 1994 through the constitutional amendments the Dalits Adivasis women in general got the reservation of political repensation the local government but there has been various forms of discrimination exclusion and violence against Dalits Adivasis women and they have not been allowed to execute the the constitutional power in the local self-government friends the very important aspect that I would like to mention here the entire discourse of the human rights and the atrocities now I mean we could see that the nexus between the perpetrators political parties judiciary and executives that is government which is really a dangerous trend that in in order to delivering the the justice system and in every cases every aspects in our experience finally when it goes to the trial in the special court within the special court also we have witnessed this kind of nexus where the the important critical cases have been acute in the special court some of the examples I would like to quote here that in 1997 58 Dalit people were being killed including women and children by the private army called Ranveer Sena all those accused have been convicted in the sessions court but in 2013 October all those accused have been acute in by the high court this not only one particular case I can give you many case these type of massacre killings many of the cases which have been convicted in the sessions court but all those accused have been acute in the high court it is because of the political influence because of the nexus and I I would like to say that even within the judiciary there is a cast bias exist I will give you a very very concrete example in the recent past in the same issues where there is a investigative media called cobra post they have they have they have done it investigations in the last three years two years and they have conducted interviews with all those accused the commentators of the Ranveer Sena the private armies and the founder members and documented the video and recently they screened in the press club of Delhi which reveals allowing information that in all those cases from 1994 in the state of Bihar till 1997 more than 3000 people were systematically planned and killed of Dalits including women and children the the dangerous information that that the the accused they confessed is that the many of the leaders political parties that is the party which is ruling today and many of the leaders been financed and the training has been given and weapons have been given from the defense and including former prime minister Hans is there in the in the in the atrocities against the in the Bihar state this is very very dangerous portion that we could witness we know that there has been nexus in the village level in the court and in the special court but there is a state sponsored the parties are beginning and supported this kind of crimes and more than 3000 Dalits were killed this 1997 incident all those accused were acute in the I court we are challenging this and this is becoming one of the evidence for us we already filed a private appeal in the supreme court and we are fighting with for the justice of the the Dalits in the Bihar state because after the the judgment in Patna some of our activists have been visited the villages till since 1997 even today the Dalits are living in threats fear and the rehabilitation not took place properly the boy who was five years old today has grown up is roaming around with the bullets and women are under threat and they asked that okay all those people are not guilty they have been acute in the I court that I am including president of India K.R. Narayanan he has made a statement that is a national shame but today these people who have been survived in the village they are asking okay if they are not committed guilty but tell us who has killed us so the government is not able to answer today like this media who have been sympathized and supporters they have been exposing who the people who have been killed those Dalits in the state of Bihar just two minutes animation yeah this is similar kinds of massacre killings where Dalits have been convicted in the sessions court I court has been acquitted because of the political influences but in the contradictory we can say that the under Indian penal court the majority of the Dalits who have been convicted for the false charges this is I mean we can we can also say that the death penalty given to Dalits when it's 90 percent 94 percent when it compared to non Dalit communities which is totally contradiction to the justice that we are seeking the need for restarting addressing solidarity based on my experience let me share some of the our views that our approach also need to be changed in order to strengthening the service as the change agent so instead of addressing making voice by individuals the service need to be strengthened as a collective voice as a change agent for seeking of justice that includes women as the service of the Dalit women as a change agent then the third aspect is the we have to strengthen the policy reforms as I mentioned about the schedule called solidarity prevention of atrocities act also the increased accountability of duty bearers institution mechanism need to be strengthened then the fourth is we have been providing legal aid legal support to all those service of the cost atrocities but now we need to look at from legally to monitoring of the accountability of the criminal justice administration system itself including monitoring of the court court procedures and the intervening into the court and also we need to have a kind of shift from the first generation right to second generation of right looking at the socio economic cultural rights which is also very very important to to empower the community and strengthen the public and private institutions in public and private institutions including education institutions we need to monitor and see that the zero discrimination violence prevails in the institutions by enacting special regulations or guidelines into education institution then increasing the depth of evidence building that's very very important so far we have been also doing concentrating on this but still we need to build in-depth evidences like govra post how they brought out the evidences similarly we need to look at this aspect then focus on the downwards swing and linkage to the relevant global UN international policies which impacts at the national policies like the UN principles and guidelines on the elimination of all forms of work and decent based discrimination similarly all the UN policies also need to be looked at, monitored and impacted at the national level then very important is strengthening the lateral linkages south collaboration the shift from the north-south solidarity support to south-south relationships strengthening the Dalit movement Dalit civil society's movement and parliament here in war part of the policy policy makers at this level okay wrap up so with this I would like to thank for these opportunities thank you very much I just like to say a big thank you to all our speakers for almost sticking to time I would like to open up the floor now for questions comments I would ask that you do identify yourself name and organization if relevant and also if your comments then try and keep them brief and questions please be precise so yes do we have a roving mic still there what about I don't know okay go please please with a loud voice sort of general disparities okay yep okay I'll take a couple of questions and then I'll open up to the panel any other questions comments Jean please what opportunities does that give us are actually well and be stronger and tougher within all of those countries about who is basically into I know it's an issue later on but you know those who are finding themselves working in those industries what are their opportunities that we should be taking to actually push it for higher and better standards across the board but obviously specific measures to ensure that communities and families who are facing real discrimination wow thank you Jean there's a gentleman here yes very good you saw us and as always very good to see and I guess it's been probably due to the discussion here we'll share we had less of in the morning and and I wonder if we if we had had I guess it's included in in the first keynote presentation whether other processes than market related processes would have been important such as overt state violence such as overt removal of people from the land in order to make space for economic development of other sorts etc as well as police and armed and army atrocities against our devices I think one should be careful to not to make oppression only to an issue of markets however regarding our devices and and the business economy I I I I I think it it would be interesting to to dwell on to what to what extent the local business economy is pro-poor I think Barbara Harris White said that the local business economy was was pro-poor for our devices as far as I I'm aware figures published by the labor year book by the Institute for Human Development and it's probably in excess figures show that that the business economy for Dalits and our devices has has a huge proportion of of of of very poor people within the business economy as opposed to when we're looking at at the OPCs and in particular a general caste which tends to be well off within the business economy so is businesses so it's necessarily a way out of poverty for Dalits and our devices or is it as as another speaker said mainly survival activities that takes place with within the business economy Okay, thank you I'll come to you in the next round there's I'll take those three questions maybe that that last question Barbara would you like to start no Okay Ashwini sure Yeah, I'll actually say a line each of each of the questions that you might so the question of disparities within Dalits I mean in terms of if you just look at data sources we don't have data by Jati yet so there can be qualitative accounts but if you I mean since I work with quantitative measures it's at the moment not possible to look at quantitatively disparities within any any of these large categories but yes there are qualitative accounts that one can look at and on the question of what can be done by business actually I've actually written a small primer for the IDSN which talks about sorry for a bit of self-promotion here but basically the whole point is that there are several multinational companies that operate in India that are that follow the principle of diversity in their home countries for example in the United States so the United States for example has a top 100 diversity companies etc and so the point that we are making in that primer is that if you can pay attention to workforce diversity in the countries of your origin why not pay attention to workforce diversity in countries such as India and that's really the simple thing and so now when you look at the annual reports of many of these large companies they talk about how diversity is actually good for business and so the way to define the bottom line is not simply an old-fashioned way of looking at profits but also the whole you know there are many many arguments given in favor of diversity one of them being that people from different social backgrounds bring a variety of problem solving skills which are important for the success of businesses so those are the kinds of arguments we have made in that primer and I think the way to sell it is really through emphasizing why diversity might be good for business that's my personal view which is that if you tell the businessman that you know you must pay attention to making a diverse workforce because it's good to reduce social inequalities in India I don't think that's going to work they'll say well we don't particularly care about that we care about our profits but if you say the diversity is good for you because your profits are going to go up then maybe that might be a better way for them to introduce so that's as far and the final thing is about the business data that at least I was referring to comes from two different sources not from the national sample survey which doesn't actually have earnings of the self-employed in their dataset so I have the micro small and medium enterprises data the MSME dataset and a new dataset that's now being used in India increasingly which is called the India Human Development Survey which has a module on non-farm household businesses and the MSME dataset which is a census of all micro small and medium enterprises datasets and so the conclusions that I was talking about are based upon that and there actually in the papers we look at the schedule casts and schedule tribes separately Dalits and Adivasi separately so there are some similarities some differences but maybe I don't have the time to go into the details right now I'm going to ask Barbara to respond and then Ramesh but to keep it brief so we can get enough questions okay I'd like to respond to all three aspects I this year I've done some field work on the waste economy in a small town in northern Tamilad and so while Ashwini says rightly that the big databases don't discriminate when you can actually talk to people you can answer this question which I can't do in under an hour so that's that but there are in the waste economy we could identify Parayas Parayas and a group that in some parts of Tamil Nadu are said schedule cast but they're called Arundhatias they're migrants from Andhra but in this part of Tamil Nadu they've spent a lot of effort to try to relabel themselves relabeling is very important in escaping stigma and they call themselves Kattunaikas and they have scheduled tribal status and they form the bulk of the municipal municipal sanitation labour force and they work together at work but they live very separately outside work and together they distinguish themselves from Irla's who are tribes scheduled tribal people from the forests whom they referred to as animals as not fully human so when we look at discrimination we need to distinguish what's going on in the workplace what's going on in the interface between work and the rest of society and what's going on in reproductive sphere by which I mean life outside work the creation of the labour force of the next generation and some discrimination takes the form of avoidance and of of shunning Jean's question about business all I would say is that the Ministry of Sanitation which I think comes under public works has a lot of documents about technology upgrading the dreadful system that the waste economy has at present and the implications of everything that the Government of India is producing on what to do about waste is the massive displacement of labour is the replacement of this labour force which is labouring under terrible conditions some earning three to five thousand rupees a month municipal sanitation labour earning 15 to 25 thousand rupees a month to displace this labour altogether and yet the waste economy is a massive great sponge for low-cost people and the answer's last point is it is business a way out for tribal people well Ashwini has done this for schedule casts rather than schedule tribes and so answers no and there's a huge debate in India about self-employment is it entrepreneurial or is it disguised wage labour is it done under conditions of speculation and volunteerism or is it forced and the answer is it's all these things and again we need to know specifically about locations but where I was working in February schedule tribal people were in the food industry for their own customers septic tank voiding business land rovers taxing chauffeuring and tour organisers so they were able this is the kind of thing that they they rest their laurels on these are the aspirational jobs for schedule cast entrepreneurs thank you Barbara Ramesh there are two things I'd like to respond one is John Dalton raised questions regarding the discrimination within the communities yes there has been you know very well he has been working in Tamil Nadu addressing cost-based discrimination there has been many cost within the untouchable communities there has been lots of disparities atrocities against the Dalit communities within the communities because the cost issue has been such a complex and deep rooted and yes there are invisible communities which are still under the under the what I call economically socially still they are weaker sections that need to be given a special attention special focus and with regard to death penalty many countries they are repealed or abolished this capital punishment still in India that death penalty still exist and there has been so many campaigns which were also part of it to to abolish this capital punishment but very easily conveniently the people who have been executed the death penalty of the Dalits and the Muslim communities I think India still need to go long way to bring reform in the criminology in the criminal justice system so that is still a long struggle within the community thank you I had a few hands up for the second round I'm Srikanth and then Eugene and then the gentleman there with the green shirt thank you very much I'm Srikanth the broker from Union City Office of Sex I have two questions first for experts of for South Asian society most of them are present here to David especially and Barbara as well being a student of anthropology I have been observing I have been to yesterday's this twin event as well so the kind of anthropological gaze or the psychological clinical gaze I have been observing that it is always been and it has been dominantly on the people those who are out of the shadows and what about reversing the same anthropological gaze towards those who are in the shadows I mean to say the perpetrator of the cast so there has been less attention going on is given on them which I have been observing on so what is the reason and what how we could do with this second question being an ambidecrite activist my question is to the chair Meena ji yes that in the recent elections as I live in Southall and I myself witnessed that the election among the British Indian voters the main issue which this election was fought on was which government is going to support the cast anti-caste distribution legislation and then we are going to vote them so is this kind of the stigma or this dirt from the Indian society is it also taking its new form on international level and as the UK is a part of European Union as well and recently there was much you uncry on the part of the European Union as well so what is your take and what measures you are going to take on this so these are my two questions thank you very much thank you Eugene you need to introduce yourself please oh my name is Eugene Kulas I am coming from an organisation called Voice of Dalit International because you are coming from a university I would like to draw your attention to 2013 when the UK government adopted the equality act with the cast provisions there was a big you know lobbying from the university side especially if Hindu scholars he brought out an article a booklet on Hinduism and said that the government policy is not at all suitable for UK why that you know even if they don't say anything it's okay but why should the progressive institutions like universities and professors with PhDs and things like that come out to support the obscuranty missions and going against the qualities in this country can the process be reversed why is there an absence of experts in caste discrimination because when we talk to anybody they only speak about a fraction of the subject but not the whole subject and we have experts in development with no training in caste discrimination and caste as a root cause of poverty and that can you explain this little bit because you are from the academia and you are known for taking up the lit course thank you thank you the gentleman in the green shirt at the back I'm Stephen Beats and currently a research associate at Soats my question is to all three can you describe a little bit the relationship between Dalits and processes and patterns of rural and agricultural mechanization currently taking place and the role of government in then the direction of in a sense national choice of technique which used to be a central debate in the 60s and 70s but now doesn't seem to be on the agenda we know Danda has a hand up yeah there she is oh thank you it's normal oh well thank you Ashmi thank you so much for all of your presentations very enlightening I'll start for a question taking a cue for what Barbara said about the contradictory forces that there are in both challenging tasks at some levels but also reinforcing it in other ways and it's and you also said that the balance of forces is localized so my question is to all three of you if you will take India not as a whole but in terms of different states one where are the gaps in research all of you have said that we need the evidential basis you want to which states you know there are different states that people work on and which states do we need more research on that's one I mean there are many here who would want to maybe encourage themselves or their students and the second is from the existing record you have even if it is global and from different indices which state has is so far the best model you know both in terms of conviction rates in terms of having challenged gas in terms of emerging forms of intercast relations and so on in a positive way so I want to know I know the Gujarat model is no model okay so I'm coming from asking you where in your research what have you found which state is it that one can look at for something positive maybe thank you okay thank you I think we'll just take those questions for a start maybe Ramesh you want to start with talking about reversing the gaze bringing the perpetrators out of the shadows yeah wish to answer there are few things I'd like to respond one is the the modernization or mechanization in the agriculture in the recent past after the globalization particularly the employment guarantee act in the rural area the relationship between the landowner and the agriculture labor also being changed changing the lack of labor today we can see in the villages the Dalits also migrate from the village from village to cities in order to escape from the cost operations and they go for different occupations so the feudal system within the village is also being changed where there is inevitable that the mechanism have to be introduced in the village if at all the farming have to be continued also the farming also being changed because of the globalization nowadays the big companies are entering to farming productions in the large scale so over the period of time all the farmers also going to be replaced that is the kind of trend or threat are existing number two in order to look at the statistics which is based state or less atrocities state but for me immediately it's very difficult because there are 22 states have been declared as atrocity prone states out of 30 states 22 states are declared as a atrocity prone state by the government which means 22 states are worst state the rest mostly it is not the states where the list are very less population and out of 601 districts in the country almost 201 districts are declared as a atrocity prone districts you can see in the website of the Ministry of Social Justice and the informant so these are the worst state and districts I'll ask the other two speakers to respond but really very briefly because I don't want to be responsible for putting the whole timetable out so I'm happy to Thanks Barbara On the perpetrators over several decades I've been talking to businessmen and businessmen tell me that Dalits have special talents for working in the hot sun or doing hard work or doing dirty work and I've also been told over the years fairly regularly since a horrible incident in 1973 that they're not fully human and so I feel that this question is a very good one to research why people feel that other human beings are not fully human and what are they entitled to do as a result of that conviction so I can't answer it but it is a very very important question on the question about universities and prejudice universities are sites for freedom of speech and sometimes freedom of speech can be very very controversial there's a debate going on in oxford about whether the current PM should be invited to oxford and you can imagine the forces arranged for and against this but we the universities must harbor a range of views and the role of the university is to examine these views and see what assumptions they're based on what evidence they're based on how robust they are that's part of our job and if there weren't people that some people in this audience consider to be bigots in universities then it wouldn't be the university sector wouldn't be doing their job what we must do is examine the proposition propositions put under the microscope and criticise them as well as we can on the UK and because this question was quite a wide-ranging question I'm sorry it's the issue of discrimination against Dalits in the UK is really difficult to get the kind of evidence that an MP might want or might might expect to have because firstly where are Dalits in the UK secondly how to find out in a global way what what their experiences of discrimination might be many Dalits will not come forward in the UK I know this from a colleague who tried to do this work they will not come forward they are upwardly mobile they want to deny things which actually do happen to them from day to day so it's extremely difficult issue to research Steve the question about mechanisation and agriculture well you know better than anybody else that agriculture is being Dalitised and it's being aged the workers are aging because young men educated men are leaving agriculture in droves and it's becoming feminised there's good statistical evidence to show all this but more to the point I think your question is speaking to the new agricultural agenda in India which rejects the kinds of farming systems research that you had contributed to so very importantly in the 70s and 80s where these issues of the relationship between machines and fossil fuel energy and livelihoods and human beings and their wage rates were very important they are not important anymore what the agricultural establishment in India is waiting for is a GM revolution yeah good