At the BBC’s website, the online correspondent for BBC News in India, Soutik Biswas, writes: Is the free market improving lives of India’s Dalits?
Here’s his question:
Does free market drive social change? By rewarding talent and hard work, does it help bring down social barriers? More pertinently, has the unshackling of the Indian economy helped the country’s untouchables, or Dalits, to forge ahead?
A group of economists and Dalit scholars led by Devesh Kapur at the University’s of Pennsylvania’s Centre for the Advanced Study of India, believes so. India’s 160 million Dalits are some of its most wretched citizens, because of an unforgiving and harsh caste hierarchy that condemns them to the bottom of the heap.
The study quizzed all Dalit households – more than 19,000 – in two clusters of villages in Azamgarh and Bulandshahar, two poor, backward districts in Uttar Pradesh state.Dalits were asked about their material and social conditions now and in 1990 when economic reforms were kicking off in India. The answers, says the study, provide proof of “substantial changes in a wide variety of social practices affecting Dalit well-being.”
Many Dalits report a genuine and valuable improvement in their condition following economic liberalization.
Yet, these are hard questions, and they’re difficult to answer in a society so old, and so large, as India. That there are positive accounts from Dalits, themselves, is encouraging.
Biswas offers a cautious, hopeful conclusion —
Whether the market is reducing inequality remains a highly contentious point. My hunch is that political empowerment must have played a powerful role in many of the changes: the rise of Dalit politics coincided with the liberalisation of the economy. But the last word comes from the group of scholars behind the study: “No one would argue Dalits have achieved anything like equality, but it is certainly the case that many practices that reflected subordination and routine humiliation of Dalits have declined considerably.” That, by itself, is a considerable triumph for India’s wretched of the earth.
That’s reason for optimism and confidence.