In survey of Scheduled Castes, govt measures discrimination via 14-point checklist
Conducted under the supervision of the
Justice Nagamohan Das Committee
, the survey features a questionnaire containing 42 questions — including a specific section that sought responses to 14 caste-based discriminatory practices.
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Enumerators, guided by a govt-issued survey manual — accessed by TOI — were instructed to collect data on how many of these 14 social stigmas each respondent had faced.
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For instance, question 41 read: "Is your household subjected to any social discrimination?" Responses will be classified under the 14 listed practices, which included being denied the right to eat with other castes, being served in separate cups at rural tea shops, restrictions on wearing footwear or carrying umbrellas in front of dominant castes, and denial of entry into upper-caste homes.
The survey also will attempt to capture public space discrimination, including denial of access to temples, roads, and burial grounds or cremation sites. In schools and workplaces, the questionnaire sought data on caste-based practices such as bonded labour, social boycotts for resisting forced labour, and separate seating for SC students — documenting what the committee identified as educational and employment-related untouchability.
This line of questioning is understood to support groundwork for the proposed Rohit Vemula Act, aimed at curbing
caste-based discrimination
in schools and colleges and introduced by Congress MP Rahul Gandhi and backed by chief minister Siddaramaiah.
Community-level segregation was another key focus. The survey included questions about isolation of SC members during village festivals and events and if they were made to sit or eat separately. It also examined whether similar discriminatory arrangements existed across other public village spaces. Further, responses were sought on the treatment of denotified criminal tribes.
Besides documenting discrimination, the survey assessed the economic, educational, and social conditions of SC households, aiming to build a comprehensive dataset on backwardness across castes.
The report concludes with an excerpt from the survey manual that struck a note of hope: "The best score hasn't been made yet, the best song hasn't been sung, the best tune hasn't been played yet, Cheer up, for the world is young!"
While the report is yet to be made public, officials suggested that the findings could become central to Karnataka's internal reservation policy, aimed at addressing intra-SC disparities.
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You can have more of one only at the cost of the other. As Eisenhower said: 'Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed…' It was 1953 and, perhaps, Eisenhower remembered how 3mn Indians had starved to death in the Bengal famine a decade earlier. Historians say the calamity wasn't caused by drought but the misplaced priorities of Churchill's wartime cabinet. True, there was a shortage of grain in Bengal in 1943, but London made it worse by continuing to export rice from the province for British troops. The price of grain skyrocketed, and when Indian officials sought an emergency supply of wheat, London declined. Saving Empire became more important than saving people. This is a representative AI image People Suffer It doesn't matter who imposes war on whom — whether Russia invades Ukraine or Afghanistan erupts in civil war — non-combatants pay a high price. A UN Women research paper shows how the Afghan govt spent 37% of its budget on defence and policing in 2019, as against 6% on health. In Mali, another war-torn country, defence expenditure in 2017 was five times higher than the outlay for social programmes. Contrast that with Kiel Institute's data for G7 nations. Over a 90-year period, from 1872 to 1962, their military expenditure exceeded social programmes, dipping below 20% of their budget only once, immediately after WW-1. But today, these nations spend less than 10% of their budget on defence, as against more than 40% on social expenditure. Under pressure from Trump, Nato members have pledged to raise defence spending to 5% of GDP by 2035, but don't count on it. This is a representative AI image No Winners War can spur the economy — as it's done in Russia — by increasing demand for killing machines, but data shows a dollar spent on the military produces fewer jobs than a dollar spent on infrastructure, health, education, etc. The Vietnam war may have been good for US defence contractors, but it hurt ordinary Americans by starting an inflation spiral that lasted till the 80s. Likewise, the post-9/11 American wars diverted money away from infrastructure and the social sector, and have run up an $8tn bill. So, guns or butter? Sometimes, countries — like Ukraine — don't have a choice, but when they do — like Russia — they should pick butter, and a loaf of Borodinsky. War on words: Conflict corrupts language - Part 7 Nazi leader Joseph Goebbels used to make speeches inciting violence against Jews War distorts everything, including language. Govts invent sterile phases and crude metaphors to make violence seem less disturbing and/or to diminish those perceived to be the enemy. But repeated use of such vocabulary changes societies using it, corrupting its soul and desensitising people to brutality or even genocide. It's About Control Ultimately, the goal of war vocabulary is to maintain control and justify actions that would otherwise be deemed as extreme or beyond the borders of reasonability. Writer John Rees says that George Orwell recognised this long ago. He understood that corruption of language was not a side-effect of political decay but the mechanism itself. Words only have meaning in relation to other words. And if one starts shifting those associations, meanings themselves change. This is a representative AI image Take Israel's war in Gaza following the Oct 7 terror attack. Israeli authorities have consistently deployed a strategy that plays on Israeli citizens' fears and anxieties to justify the relentless bombardment of the Palestinian enclave. Therefore, Israel's military actions are portrayed as necessary 'security measures'. And the Israeli phrase that captures this perfectly is 'mowing the grass'. The latter essentially refers to Palestinians as weeds that need to be cut from time to time to keep the backyard neat. Former Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant also referred to Palestinians as 'human animals', reinforcing the perception that Palestinian lives weren't equal to Israeli lives. This is a representative AI image Moral Detachment This strategy was also used by the Nazis, describing Jews as 'the tapeworm in the human organism'. Joseph Goebbels claimed that 'Jews have to be killed off like rats'. Stalin's USSR adopted this playbook, but in a more sophisticated form. Political dissidents in Soviet Russia were described as 'bloodsuckers', 'vampires' or 'vermin' that had to be purged. We see this Soviet vocabulary continue in Russia's war against Ukraine where Ukrainians are described as 'khokhols', a derogatory reference to hair, and Ukraine as 'malorossiya' or little Russia. But another layer has been added to the terminologies, that of moral detachment. The latter allows even greater flexibility to bend international rules and normalise brutality. Thus, the term war is replaced by 'special military operation' as Russia has done with respect to its Ukraine aggression. This is a representative AI image Similarly, American media came up with 'US military intervention' in Afghanistan and Iraq instead of US invasion that American actions against those two countries amounted to. Civilian Afghan and Iraqi lives lost in those wars were put down as 'collateral damage'. Impersonal War Machines Worse, sterile terminologies that justify mass death and suffering are likely to get a boost with AI and autonomous defence platforms. When a drone operator takes out a target thousands of miles away, he only sees a blip on the screen. When autonomous tanks roll through civilian areas, the operator is playing a video game in his bunker. These technologies desensitise us to the horrors of war and normalises conflict. Then people are no longer killed but 'neutralised'. Countries are not invaded but 'restructured'. Civilian targets become 'human shields' to be destroyed. And war becomes the solution for 'root causes'.
