Inequalities in India

India’s 1950 constitution abolished practices of “untouchability”, which excluded Dalits from many aspects of Indian society. The constitution also aims to protect the rights of and improve opportunities for Dalits, including providing access to opportunities for education and employment. Protections for Dalits were further strengthened in 1955, 1989 and 2015, with laws that introduced fines and imprisonment for people found guilty of certain discriminatory practices, and aimed to prevent violent exploitative acts and human rights abuses against these groups. Despite all these legal provisions, significant gaps exist between what is enshrined in law and what takes place in practice. Untouchability practices and forced and exploitative labour are still a big problem in India today.

The challenges with caste-based discrimination are closely intertwined with economic inequalities, including in the form of economic disadvantages. This discrimination leads to a stratification of labour where Dalits are allocated occupations that are poorly paid, demeaning and undignified, with many obstacles to improve their status. Enduring caste-based norms related to who one can marry, where one can live, and with whom one can socialise, combined with unequal access to education, discriminatory hiring practices and direct violence and obstruction, place limits on social mobility. In effect, this is a form of discrimination that causes inequalities to persist and pre-determines who occupies the lowest strata of society.

Economic inequalities, caste-based discrimination and gender discrimination combine to create a particularly extreme and striking form of discrimination in the case of India’s safai karmacharis (manual scavengers) – people from the Dalit community who are compelled to engage in the demeaning and dangerous work of manually cleaning excrement from dry latrines, sewers and septic tanks.

In India, engaging anyone to do this work has been prohibited by law, going back to the ban on untouchability introduced in 1955. This was reinforced by additional laws that focused specifically on ending manual scavenging in 1993 and 2013 – including provisions intended to help people engaged in manual scavenging to transition to other work.

Nevertheless, many of the programmes intended to help in the rehabilitation of safai karmacharis have not been fully implemented. To this day, there are an estimated 1.2 million people who continue to do this work. Most safai karmacharis are very poorly paid for their work, and some are not paid at all, or are paid in leftover food, access to land for grazing or collecting firewood, or in-kind donations. In urban areas, safai karmachari men who work as sewer cleaners are usually hired as daily labourers, with little job security. They are often paid rates that are lower than the legal minimum wage. Many are forced to go into debt to meet their needs and often suffer from inter-generational debt.