Caste, untouchability and inequality

Caste traditionally tied people to an occupation and a status. In practice, a caste's ritual rank and its economic position usually coincided: upper castes owned land and had education, while lower castes did manual labour and owned little.

Today there are rich and poor people in every caste. But at the macro level (looking at the whole country), the link between caste and class is still stable. Surveys show:

• the STs (about 45 per cent of rural STs were poor, the highest) and the SCs have the highest poverty;
• upper castes (and among religions, Sikhs) have the lowest poverty.

Caste still shapes life chances: education, jobs, income and health.

Untouchability is the most extreme form of caste inequality. It has three dimensions:

• Exclusion: from shared water sources, temples, schools and public places.
• Humiliation and subordination: forced gestures of inferiority, like removing footwear or not sitting in the presence of upper castes.
• Exploitation: forced, unpaid or badly paid labour.

It was found across India (pan-Indian), though its forms differed by region.

Comparing with race: apartheid in South Africa, which became law in 1948, separated people by race in housing, jobs and public places. Like caste, it decided a person's whole life by birth.

Names: in the 1930s, Gandhi used the term 'Harijan' (people of God). Many of those it described found it patronising. The term 'Dalit', meaning downtrodden or oppressed, was popularised by the Dalit Panthers of Maharashtra in the 1970s; it expresses pride and protest.