Old but not gold

More than one person has asked me what happened to the idea of repealing old laws. I am a bit surprised, because that information is in the public domain. It is just that the media hasn’t picked it up. First, the Law Commission reports: In September 2014, the 248th report of the Law Commission was submitted. This gave us a database of 1,086 Union laws. This database excludes the 253 laws that were recommended for repeal earlier, but still continue to be on the statute books. It excludes the 34 statutes that have been repealed — though some government ministries and departments don’t know that these have been removed from the law books. The database also excludes the appropriation acts. The 248th report recommended the repeal of 72 statutes and identified another 261 for further scrutiny. In October 2014, the 249th report of the Law Commission was submitted. This identified 77 more statutes for repeal. There were separate recommendations on partial repeal and on the 11 World War II ordinances. In October 2014, there was also the 250th report of the Law Commission. This identified 73 more statutes for repeal. Without getting into the details of how the numbers add up, with these three reports, 258 statutes have been identified for repeal. Further, in November 2014, there was the 251st report of the Law Commission. With 30 more statutes added, the number of laws identified for repeal now went up to 288. 

That still doesn’t answer the original question. Commission reports are fine. What about action? In fairness, after a report is submitted, there is a process for repeal that has to be followed. One needs to write to the Union government ministries and state governments. One can only draft a bill to repeal a law after this process of receiving comment is over. Thus, on May 13 came the first Repealing and Amending Act (Act No 17 of 2015). This repealed 35 statutes (mostly amending statutes) and amended two others. Then, on May 14, there was the Repealing and Amending (Second) Act (Act No 19 of 2015). This repealed 90 statutes (amending statutes) and amended two. It is certainly true that getting rid of amending acts is an easier task. Repealing principal acts is more complicated, and especially for the 250th and 251st reports, feedback from the Union ministries and state governments is still pending. But at least some people know of the four Law Commission reports. I find it strange that few know of the R. Ramanujam Committee, though that information is also in the public domain. This was set up by the prime minister’s office in September 2014. It submitted a mammoth four-volume report, more comprehensive than the Law Commission exercise. Thus, we know that since 1834, 6,612 Central statutes have been enacted. 

At some point or the other, 3,831 have been repealed. We are left with 2,781 Central statutes (as of October 2014), including amending legislation and appropriation acts. Of these, the Ramanujam Committee identified 1,741 Central acts for repeal. (The committee is also undertaking a consolidation exercise, but let’s ignore that.) Of the 1,741 statutes, 777 need to be repealed by the Union government; 83 by state legislatures, since these are Central acts on state subjects; 624 are Central appropriation acts; and 257 are Central appropriation acts on state subjects, which, therefore, have to be repealed by state legislatures. If one ignores those that have to be repealed by the state legislatures, the 125 statutes that have already been repealed — 90 by the Repealing and Amending (Second) Act, 2015, and 35 by the Repealing and Amending Act, 2015 — must be benchmarked against the 1,401 acts that have been identified for repeal (777 plus 624). It is true that we haven’t even done 10 per cent yet. But that doesn’t mean nothing is being done.

 Let’s get the appropriation acts out of the way first, because those are easier to handle. There are 902 of them, including railway and state appropriation acts. Once legal opinion has been obtained, these will go — it is only a matter of time. Looking at the Law Commission and Ramanujam Committee reports together,  the picture is something like this: 637 acts can be repealed by Parliament (once the ministries send in their views); 84 acts have to be repealed by state legislatures; 58 acts can be repealed by Parliament, but only in consultation with state governments; and for 28 acts, which have something or the other to do with state reorganisation, the views of the home ministry are essential. Out of this complicated agenda, I suspect one will soon have a third repealing and amending act, whereby another 197 of those old statutes will be junked. I don’t think the process is taking inordinately long. It is also an exercise that should have been undertaken in 1950, when the Constitution came into effect, and not in 2015. 

Having said this, it is important to appreciate another aspect. It isn’t always the case that a statute can be repealed in its entirety. There are cases where a statute needs to be retained, but has sections that should be scrapped. There are instances where a consolidation and harmonisation exercise is required. There are also instances where repeal has to be matched with new legislation to plug the gaps. These take more time than outright repeal. If media reportage has been tardy on this repealing exercise, it has been tardier on a parallel and ongoing exercise in Rajasthan. The Rajasthan law reform project is not only about labour legislation. There, too, there is outright repeal, consolidation and harmonisation of rules as well as of acts. Some statutes have already been repealed and one is left with roughly 600 state-level statutes, 400 principal and 200 amending. At least 10 per cent of the former and 100 per cent of the latter are likely to go soon. The writer is member, Niti Aayog. 

The Importance of Being #'Rurban

A categorical distinction is facing rough weather--that between urban and rural. If we take just agriculture, there is so much of the outside world that comes in not just as external markets but as external inputs. Further, many of our villages barely qualify as rural if we were to take occupation alone. So the earlier line that separated the farmer from the worker in towns is slowly getting erased. By now agriculturists are ready to accept that their future lies elsewhere, perhaps in cities and towns, perhaps also in household and informal industries. If they cannot make it to those places, at least their children should.

Dipankar Gupta (dipankargupta@hotmail. com) teaches at the Shiv Nadar University, Noida, Uttar Pradesh.

This is the text of my V K R V Rao lecture delivered in May 2014 in Bengaluru. A fellowship in Teen Murti Memorial Museum and Library got me started on this subject. I subsequently benefi ted from discussions with a number of scholars at the National University for Education Planning and Administration, New Delhi, and Shiv Nadar University.

Hard To Be Rural

India may not yet be quite urban, but neither is it rural. Perhaps, the clumsy term “rurban” might suffice for the time being; for time being it is, given the rapid transformation that is taking place in Village India.

When India became independent, almost 50% of the economy was rural; the latest figures tell us it is barely 14% now. The rate of growth in agriculture hovers around 2.5% to 3.5% per annum. This, as we can easily tell, is well below the gross domestic product (GDP) growth figures for the country as a whole. True, big farmers are now a rare sight in villages, but this blight does not affect big farms alone, but the agricultural sector in general. This should be seen alongside that the area leased in has fallen, according to the 59th round of the National Sample Survey (NSS 2006: Table 3.2). Sharecropping is more or less a thing of the past. Area under food crops came down between 1950–51 and 2009–10 from 80.7% to 73.5% (Red Book 2008: 35). Naturally, and it is almost predictable, between 1994 and 2001, real investment in agriculture declined by as much as 20% (Acharya et al 2004: 216). That this has been happening steadily over the years does not reduce the effect of its cumulative impact on agriculture. Quantity does yield to quality sooner rather than later.

Today, roughly 80% of landholdings in India are below five acres, and about 66% below three acres. Some of this must be credited to land reforms, for they have made the acquisition of large holdings legally suspect, but, in a great measure, one has to hand it to demography. What the abolition of zamindari (big landlords) set out to do was accomplished most comprehensively by population growth and subdivision of holdings. Where villages were once dominated by powerful landlords, today they are home to thousands of small, family farms. Family farms, by definition, have very little scope for hiring labour, except perhaps during the peak harvesting season. Large and medium farms are finding it hard to survive on land, which is why the ranks of small and marginal farmers keep growing (DACNET 2013; Chand et al 2011: 7; NSS 2006).

By now agriculturists are ready to accept that their future lies elsewhere, perhaps in cities and towns, perhaps also in household and informal industries. If they cannot make it to those places, at least their children should. Thus, while cultivators, in general, constitute about 44.0% of the rural population, this number rises to 63.6% if we take only those among them who are over 60 years of age (IAMR 2008: 233). Most small family farms are clearly being tended to by the older generation so that their young can go out into the big, wide world.

Agriculture is not outside market forces, nor do farmers want it that way. This is because almost all villagers are tied to the market for their needs and are not self-sufficient, as many peasant myths go. Not only is there now an increased dependence on cash crops, but also, as a consequence, a greater reliance on chemical inputs and pump sets. From 1981–82 to 2009–10, the percentage of cropped area to cereals and millets went down by more than 9%. The markets for jowar (sorghum) and bajra (millet) are nowhere near that for wheat or rice, and hence they are not favoured by farmers, who are looking for monetary returns.

When we come to non-food crops, a similar trend is seen. Between 1955–56 and 2011–12, oilseed production went up six times—cotton lint by about eight times, and sugar cane by more than six times. As with coarse cereals, jute, the poor person’s cash crop, only doubled in production in the same period. All this tells us where the money lies (RBI 2012a, 2012b). This increase in cash crop cultivation also meant a 25-time hike in the use of fertilisers and a threefold increase in multiple cropping. The number of pump sets went up from 2,00,000 to 25 million between 1960 and 2009, and so many of them are from China (Biggs and Justice 2011: 6). And why should they not?

It is for reasons such as these that another categorical distinction is facing rough weather—that between urban and rural. If we take just agriculture, there is so much of the outside world that comes in, not just as external markets, but as external inputs. This is the biggest difference from the past. Further, many of our villages would barely qualify as rural if we were to take occupation alone. All too often people continue to live and work in villages but are almost urban in terms of their work profile. So the earlier line that separated the farmer from the worker is slowly getting erased. This is why a labourer will seek work outside agriculture, for when he returns home after a day’s toil, say as a rickshaw puller, there will be money jingling in his pocket. Small change, one might say, but big money from the worker’s point of view. This is what prompts the poor villager to leave every morning for the bus stop or the village square in the hope that he will catch a contractor’s eye and his day will be made.

Rural Non-farm Income

As a result, there has been a tremendous increase in rural non-farm employment (RNFE) all over the country. What was once a secondary occupation for most villagers is often the primary one today. The NSS shows that the percentage of non-agricultural households increased from a pre-existing high of 31.9% in 1993–94 to 42.5% in 2009–10.

In 2009–10 the contribution of non-farm sector to the rural net domestic product was 65% (Reddy et al 2014: 10; Table 5; for an earlier estimate see Chaddha 2003: 55). Nor is this a story of the developed regions in India. The more backward the districts, the higher the proportion of men in household industries. In Uttar Pradesh (UP), for example, six times more men than women work in these manufactories and in Rajasthan the figure jumps to an unbelievable 10 times (Census of India 2001). When we examine the census data, we find that factories and workshops have quite a strong presence in rural areas. They dominate rural regions in states as disparate as Kerala, Punjab, Odisha, and Gujarat (Census of India 2001: Table H-1). A recent census of micro, small and medium enterprises (MSME) confirms the lively presence of enterprise in villages. When it is about registered units, rural India houses 45.2% of them, but in unregistered ones, there are as many as 60.2% in the countryside (MSME Annual Report 2012–13: statement 2.1; p 21).

This probably also explains why rural to rural migration is quite active. This is an area we do not pay sufficient attention to because the move to cities is much more dramatic in its outcome and numbers. After all, figures show that 29% of rural migrant households migrate from rural India and that 55% of them do so for economic reasons, with self-employment playing a major role in this (Press Information Bureau 2010). The rural rate of migration too is a respectable 26% (Press Information Bureau 2010), with nearly 91% of the movement coming in from other villages (NSS 2007–08 estimates it at 70%). We might as well underline that these migrants primarily fill the ranks of units that are categorised as “self-employed,” and in which, on an average, between two to five people work (MSME Annual Report 2012–13: statement 2.1, p 21). So, rural India is not just agricultural anymore and caters to the international as well as national urban market in terms of manufacturing. A large number of products—from bric-a-brac to clothing, to gems and jewellery, and now even to machine parts—which have a rural provenance are now available in urban households and markets.

Thus, while we have family farms that are proliferating in villages, we also have the rapid multiplication of self-employed enterprises. These outfits are the closest one can come to family farms in a non-agricultural setting. Therefore, there is an urban aspect in the village, much as there are rural aspects in cities, brought about primarily by migration from villages. We would be better off with the term “rural–urban nexus,” rather than “rural–urban continuum,” for one penetrates the other in such a fashion that a slide rule-like concept seems inadequate. Further, the very fact that there is a rural–urban nexus forces us to see the effect of the city on the village in ways other than that of acquisition (telephones, scooters, motor cars, coffee shops, and so on), and also in terms of the economy.

We cannot talk of rural India without calling out to the urban world. In the past, village field studies usually saw the town and country relationship as a one-dimensional phenomenon. For example, even in the works of Epstein (1973), it is the city that is influencing the village, but there is no word of the movement the other way. There are detailed descriptions in accounts of this sort that document how many motorcycles, TV sets, and coffee shops are in villages. But what they fail to point out is that villagers are not sleeping at the switch. They too are active agents who are keen to exchange their mud huts for urban shanties.

Nor can we really think of energising small farmers without radically addressing their felt needs and where they earn their real incomes from. This is because their economic and aspirational horizon is no longer confined to the village perimeter. As a result, there has been a diminution in the status of agriculture as an occupation. Family farms have, consequently, lost some of their esteem as a precious gift to be harvested in perpetuity. As needs have escalated, as scales of operations have increased, as inputs are getting costlier, the family farm is no longer what it was earlier cut out to be.

In the fitness of things, should we then not call the villager of today a “rurbanite”? Such a person has left much of tradition behind, though a fair amount is palpably present in a number of interactions. This makes the rurbanite a complex, multi-faceted, ambitious, and yet somewhat handicapped individual. There are a number of features that express this variegated term, but none better than the desire to get educated (Desai et al 2010: 80–81) and leave agriculture, and if possible, the village altogether. This is another reason why a greater number of literates tend to migrate from country to town (NSS 2008–09: H-ii). There has also been a steady rise in the migration of male workers from rural to urban India. In less than 10 years, from 1999–2000 to 2007–08, the number went up from 36.5% in 1999–2000 to 41.6% in 2007–08 (Kundu and Saraswati 2012: 221). In just one year, between 1999 and 2000, the proportion of people migrating for jobs jumped by as much as 15% (IAMR 2005: 303, Table 6.12).

All this goes to show that we need to check if the diacritics that once served so well in separating town from country are relevant any longer. It should not be surprising that over five billion railway tickets are sold every year in India. As anyone who knows this country will vouch, even this figure is an understatement, for most people travel ticketless on Indian Railways.

To understand the nature of rural dynamics, one must perforce look at the village as a part of a larger society. In traditional sociology, for instance, there was a great degree of attention to villages and village studies, but they suffered, in the main, from one serious flaw. For most of the scholars who worked on this subject it was their village that mattered most and India was a distant reality. There were, of course, many exceptions to the rule, but that was the rule. Even when some village experts looked at change, the overall orientation was one where the urban was impinging on certain aspects of rural life and changing it in cosmetic ways. There were tea shops, more motorcycles, more radios, and so on, but the village itself seemed more or less undisturbed. Fortunately, scholars today see little purchase in studying an isolated village—they would rather examine villages around themes that engage the country.

When examining this issue, it is impossible to ignore three major aspects that tumble out. The first is the emergence of small towns, and with it the enormous growth of the informal sector, particularly in terms of its contribution to the formal sector and to manufacturing. Second, we need to look at the growth of education, which is a necessary corollary to the first. Finally, an issue that cannot be overlooked is interesting changes that have taken place in inter-caste relations that upset most of our traditional views on the Hindu hierarchical system. Put all these together, stir it, and what you get is the rurbanite in more than one dimension.

Small Towns and the Informal Sector

That a large number of rural migrants find jobs in urban India as unskilled labour, working at things that many of their counterparts do in rural units, draws the village closer to the city in pure economic terms. As a corollary, it might be mentioned that small towns are growing at a very fast rate because real estate prices are lower there than in large metropolitan centres. The rural impact is very high in new million-plus and yet-to-be-million-plus towns. So when we talk about the nexus, we are really highlighting the interpenetration of rural and the urban, and not just a loose chain of relations (Bhagat 2011).

If we take enterprises that employ less than 10 workers, rural India follows close on the heels of urban India (IAMR 2009: 167). These are also units that service the export sector, both directly and indirectly. So our shabby manufacturing urban outposts with poor “rural” employees are actually integral parts of a global economy. It should also be noted that it is not as if only women work in such units, and in places like Himachal Pradesh and Rajasthan, the census records more men than women in household industries (Census of India 2001).

Unlike what we see in old Bollywood films, rural migrants generally do not come alone. They have a network that brings them to urban jobs and it is this network that supports them in between jobs. A network of this kind is nearly always community or region specific, which is why there are multiple networks criss-crossing one another in an urban site. Villagers long to belong to such networks, but I have also seen villages that are bereft of these long-distance ties. It is hard to explain why some villages are well endowed with such connections and others lack them. The distribution appears very idiosyncratic for a lot depends on chance, and chance alone.

In the last 20 years, a large number of cities have joined the million-plus club. In the Greater Mumbai urban agglomeration (UA), the 2001 census recorded a population increase of 30.47%, but it is now down to 12.05%. Likewise, growth in the Delhi UA slowed from 52.4% to 26.69%, and the Kolkata UA from 19.6% to 6.87% during the same time. What is, however, stunning is that between 2001 and 2011, small towns continued forming and growing rapidly. This is a fact that not many fully appreciate. The Census of India shows that 18 new cities with over a million people have emerged, but that is just a tiny part of the story. Besides the emergence of these big urban centres, there are 72 new class I towns and about 2,770 census towns (Census of India 2011). The last might look like a village at first sight, but has already developed enduring urban traits and that is where many rurbanites live.

Not only are the cities that have barely touched the million mark, such as Ludhiana, Varanasi, Bhopal and Kochi, growing in number, they are also assuming serious urban characteristics. In these aspiring big cities, a proportionately higher number of white-collar jobs are coming up than in full-blown megalopolises. According to a Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI)–Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) survey, in contrast to the older established metros such as Delhi, Mumbai, or Chennai, new managerial positions are opening up in smaller tier-2 cities. In Hoshiarpur and Meerut, for example, the increase is 100% and 133.3% respectively (Nayyar and Jain 2012: 21) This is probably why more than 50% of rural graduates prefer small towns to metros (Kundu and Mohanan: 13). This also explains why Surat, Patna, Pune, Jaipur, and Indore have growth rates exceeding 40%, much higher than that of Kolkata, or even Mumbai.

Small towns also manufacture a number of products that may not attract the eyes of those who live in metros, but these are serious money-spinners. Ghari Detergents, for one, is an extremely popular brand that few people in Delhi or Mumbai might know about. It is produced and packaged in a factory not far from Kanpur and its turnover is higher than all the Godrej fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), including Cinthol, put together. Then there is Sanjay Ghodawat, who runs a Rs 1,000-crore empire in Manakpur, which is a nondescript town about 160 kilometres from Kolhapur, another small town. In this connection, how can we overlook Tirupur in Tamil Nadu, which is the hosiery capital of India and has experienced enormous growth over the last 20 years (TNUIFCL 2011: 10)? Likewise, Agra, Bhiwani, Panipat and a host of other small towns are bustling centres of manufacturing activity, but almost always on the back of informal labour.

Many of these small towns were villages till yesterday and have broken with their official status as “rural” only recently. This makes a large number of “rurbanites” autochthones and they are joined by a large number of migrants from villages. This is simply because most growth is taking place there, which can be gauged from the massive increase in slums. In Pune, once a small town that was even looked at as a kind of “resort,” the slum population increased six times between 1971 and 2011 (DNA 2011). Delhi, Nagpur, Kolkata and Chennai have a lower percentage of slum dwellers than either Meerut and Pune, which have now taken second and third place respectively after Mumbai (Times of India2011; Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation 2011). Ludhiana, for example, has a slum population that touches 50% (Bengal Chamber of Commerce and Industry 1993: 6.10). Many small towns with a population of about 1,00,000 have beauty parlours and gymnasiums, Pizza Hut outlets and ATM machines. They also have a number of English-medium schools and management and technical institutes. As a matter of fact, it is hard not to find them even in slightly larger villages. This explains why graduates from rural areas tend to prefer small towns to the metros.

Is it surprising then that nearly 20% of India’s billionaires live outside metros?

There are probably many reasons for this shift to small towns. The most widely acknowledged is that of lower real estate costs. Equally important is that the kind of enterprises that are coming up there require low level skills, which freshly recruited villagers and resident rurbanites can easily muster. This explains the continuation of informal labour in our industrial workforce today, an issue to which we shall soon return. Also the smaller the urban area, the greater the proportion of land given to industry and mercantile activities. Cities with over 1,00,000 people have about 1.8% of its developed land devoted to commercial use, whereas in smaller urban areas, the proportion is almost 3.2% (Venkateswaralu 1998: 23). When we come to industrial use, we find again that while 6.8% of all land is devoted to that purpose in all states, it is only 5.1% in metros but as high as 14% in towns with populations between 5,00,000 and 1,000,000 (Venkateswaralu 1998: 23).

Take away a handful of companies in information technology (IT), telecommunications, and financial services, and it is hard to overlook that informal labour comprises about 93% of our workforce. This is a gold mine for small investors, looking for quick returns, with very little skill at both ends—management and labour. Not only is cheap labour pouring out of every vein, there is also no pressure to maintain proper records—if this means paying off a labour inspector, that is small change.

It is then to be expected that the dependence of the formal sector on informal/unorganised workers will grow over time in India. In 1999–2000, it was 37.8%, but it went up to 46.6% in 2004–05, and is still climbing (NCEUS 2007). When labour is ready to be hired for a song, it is tempting for business houses to rely on the informal sector. Besides, as everybody else is doing just that, it would be ruinous to play fair. If truth be told, this scruffy underclass contributes as much as 43% of our export earnings (Planning Commission 2002; Tata Services 2007: 35). Finally, consider this: The vocationally trained labour force is a stagnant 5% in India, but a staggering 95% in South Korea.

Education-Seeking Rurbanite

However, an important and necessary qualification for being a “rurbanite” is education. Notwithstanding the general ruination of the village economy, what stands out is the emphasis rural people place on education. That this is so strikingly close to what urban people do gives us another reason to classify the bulk of those who live in Village India as “rurbanites.” Whereas only 2% of Indian children went to private schools in 1980, today as many as 21% of rural children go to such institutions (Desai et al 2010). Clearly, the poor in the countryside are spending way above what they can actually afford to make sure their children get a better future.

True, rural literacy today is only 67.8% compared to 84.1% in urban India. Yet if one looks at the rate of growth of literacy, a different picture emerges. Literacy shot up in rural India at the rate of 14.75% between 1991 and 2001. This is nearly double the figure for urban India. Given the agrarian crisis that has lasted for decades, villagers believe that one of the most reliable ways of getting out of their rural confines is to seek an alternative in cities.

Small towns are also establishing educational institutes and technical schools and colleges. Obviously, there is a great desire among those who live there to better their lives. Moradabad has many such institutions and among them there is the Teerthankar Mahaveer University, the Moradabad Institute of Technology, Wilsonia Degree College, and English-medium schools such as Delhi Public School and St Jude. Hanamkonda in Andhra Pradesh has many colleges too, as well as institutes that specialise in pharmacy, technology, and business. In Kazipet, there is a Mary Convent School as well as a National Institute of Technology. Kuppam, another small Andhra town, is a kind of educational hub with engineering and medical colleges.

The above are only examples; almost every small town has an English-medium school as well as a technology and management institute of some kind. This is significant as it demonstrates a strong desire for upward mobility among small-town residents. The question still remains—is there a demand for skilled labour yet? Second, how good is the quality of these educational institutions?

There are two trends that should be placed next to each other—the increase in the literacy level of migrants and, at the same time, the overwhelming numbers of unskilled labourers that come in large numbers to cities in search of jobs. Shaw found both these tendencies in the making of Navi Mumbai. What was most striking in her presentation is the sheer number of unskilled labourers who were flooding into the city, increasing the density and number of unauthorised settlements (Shaw 2004: 122).

Interestingly, all-India figures show that a larger percentage (nearly 50%) of rural graduates migrate to small and medium-sized towns, but the total migration of this category to all urban centres is lower, at 44% (Kundu and Mohanan 2009). That the rate of literacy is increasing faster in rural India than it is in urban India indicates how serious villagers are about getting educated and leaving villages for urban jobs.

Once the ambition arises to leave the village to seek a better life, its natural cohort is the drive towards education. This explains why so many children are today going to private schools. When the family is small, parents can think of sending their children to more expensive private schools. Consequently, their dependence on government schools declines. When a poor family sends its children to private schools, it is a big strain on its finances. But private education in India has yet to reveal its hand and demonstrate its efficacy in employment and industry. The promise is there and a lot of hopes ride on it. So far the results have not been very encouraging, as even the organised sector is employing more informal labour than what it did 10 years ago. Yet, one might make allowances for all that and say it is still early days and the good times are round the corner.

New Caste Relations

Inter-caste relations too were bound to be affected by the changes in the rural economy. As big landlords are largely creatures of the past, their sway over village people has diminished almost entirely. The village oligarchs of old who ruled and terrorised the poor folk are not to be seen. Instead, we find a mass of small cultivators of nearly every caste, including the Scheduled Castes (SCs). As most agricultural holdings are now really family farms, there is hardly any scope to act as village patrons, or as despots.

That being the case, the hierarchy that dominated caste interactions had to undergo a major modification. The most important being that no caste today can actually guarantee a vote bank, nor compel other castes to do its bidding. While this was possible in the past, it is not so today. One can get a clear indication of this from that the once subjugated castes are no longer afraid of loudly expressing their heritage and identities. Doing this would have been dangerous business a few decades ago, for it would have brought physical humiliation by rural oligarchs, and a denial of favours and jobs. That the earlier poorer castes are willing and able to express pride in their heritage shows how far we have come from traditional conceptions of hierarchy.

Not only did Brahmins get undermined in villages—that was easy—but also the traditional Kshatriya communities that dominated rural India. Now, every peasant and many artisan castes claim Kshatriya status and get away with it. Naturally, this has had the greatest effect at the political level, even as caste considerations continue to stay uppermost when people think of marriages and rites of passage. In this matter again, the rural Indian is thinking and acting much as an urban person would. This once again justifies the term “rurbanite,” and we now explain at some length why such a case should be considered.

Thinking beyond Caste

There are several reasons why a rurbanite is usually forced to think beyond just caste. The principal reason why such a person can act this way is because the weight of rural oligarchy is off. It is now possible for a villager to think politically like an urban person would and act on his or her own judgment. Just as in the case of the fragmentation of landholding, demography plays an important role, albeit from a different perspective.

Except for Maharashtra, where Marathas, of one kind or another, constitute about 33% of the population, nowhere else in the country does any one caste dominate any constituency. Many journalists, academics, and other assorted experts go by popular impressions and believe that Jats, or Gujjars, or whatever, dominate certain regions of India. They then link this preconceived notion to electoral outcomes, which is why they are, more often than not, proved wrong when the votes are counted.

West UP, for example, is hastily assumed to be a Jat stronghold, but this caste only comprises between 8% and 10% of the population. Likewise, while the Yadavs are said to dominate in the rest of UP, their numbers barely cross 12% to 15% in most parliamentary constituencies. In Bihar’s Madhepura region, which is supposed to be an impregnable Yadav bastion, only 23% to 25% of the people there are from this caste. Even so, the refrain that caste numbers determine elections keeps surfacing. This is probably because it is easy to comment, write, and appear knowledgeable if an exotic explanatory variable is used. Castes as vote banks may have held at a time when some castes ruled over others as the nature of landholdings were tilted seriously in their favour. All of these are things of the past and to talk of vote banks today belies a certain alienation from reality.

Under the existing demographic conditions, where no caste has a clear numerical advantage, most voters are forced to look at candidates outside their castes. The big reason for this is that nobody wants to waste a vote. In any constituency there are usually two viable candidates, and about five to six castes of equal population strength. Even die-hard casteists would find it difficult to vote for a fellow caste politician because that contender may not be a likely winner. Such people are often forced to opt for somebody who does not belong to their caste so that their vote does not go in vain. This is the logic of demographic numbers, and it has little to do with caste sentiments.

To complete this story, one must also add that political leaders are the ones who think along caste lines most of the time. This is especially true when distributing election tickets, appointing their election agents, and firming up their goon squads. These are the people who will do all the dirty work for their leaders—the walling, postering, and bullying. It is this tie between caste and political leaders that gets represented most often by journalists and sundry academics because they spend most of their time with the supposed newsmakers of the day. Naturally, they are quick to conclude that voting takes place on caste lines, for this is how leaders operate. If they pay attention to the empirical fact of caste numbers in electoral constituencies, they may not come up with such an easy correlation.

From a distance, especially from an urban perch, or from the courtyard of a political bigwig, all SCs and Other Backward Classes (OBCs) tend to look and think alike, as if an organic bond compels them in that direction. This myth needs to be exposed. During the Marathwada riots in 1979, when the Mahars were the object of Maratha wrath but not other SCs, many Mang and leather workers chalked their caste names on their huts to escape Maratha raids.

Mayawati is, by popular consent, a leader of the Jatavs, but there are huge tracts of UP such as Kanpur, Lucknow, Allahabad, Gonda, Rae Bareilly, Pratapgarh, and Sonbhadra where SCs, other than Jatavs, are numerically stronger. So it is not as if all SCs happily jostle together when they set out from their homes to the polling booth. Only this can explain why in 2002 the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) did not win a single seat in Sonbhadra district of UP, one of the districts where Jatavs are fewer in number. But then again, Mayawati won every seat there in 2007, only to lose half of them in 2012. Therefore, even at the level of SCs in UP, there is no clear caste correlation (Gupta 2007: 3388–96).

The other factor that creates an optical illusion, leading to the conclusion that the relation between caste and politics is unproblematic, is social capital. In West UP, the Jats, and in East UP, the Yadavs, had for long dominated in terms of being the most literate, best connected, and politically most active. This is why other castes lined up in front of their doors for favours, even for something as minor as writing a petition to a government department. This naturally magnified the presence of Jats and Yadavs, giving the impression that they were everywhere, but that was some time ago. Now most peasant castes (the so-called OBCs) are getting connected on their own to the outside world, in more ways than one. Consequently, other OBCs now have their own virtuosos, their own literati, and their own connections. They no longer need a Jat or Yadav to forward their demands and push for their claims. So, if one were to visit UP and Bihar today, it is not difficult to spot tensions between OBCs up and down what was once a clear hierarchy of power and privilege. They are no longer the leading elite of the peasant communities, which is why the caste calculus falters even more when we use it to understand elections (Gupta 2000: 148–76).

What holds for the OBCs applies to the SCs as well. Over a period of time, just as in the case of the peasant castes, individual SCs have generated their own social capital and produced their own clutch of literati, schoolteachers, police inspectors, businessmen, and so on. They do not need the Mahars or the Jatavs to help them through as they did earlier.

On account of this elite rivalry, or the competition between social capital at different levels, no caste can be said to represent a broad swath of jatis (social groups) in an area as big as a parliamentary constituency. This has further loosened the stranglehold of ritual hierarchy in villages, allowing even ordinary humble folk to aspire to “rurbanite” status. This is clearly a transitory stage, as even the term suggests. Even so, by looking at transformations in India through this optic, our resistance to accepting important social changes in our country is lowered. At the same time, certain myths, misconceptions, and blind intellectual positions, whose base has long since drifted away, come under the scanner.

The “rurbanite” will yet teach the urbanite a lesson or two in social change.

A new manual for diplomats

As Prime Minister Narendra Modi completes the first year in office, his greatest momentum has been in the least expected domain — foreign policy. As a state chief minister with limited exposure to the world of international relations, Modi, it was widely believed, might face a handicap on the diplomatic front and would concentrate on his presumed strength in economic management.

If Modi’s performance on the economic front has drawn mixed reviews, many have acknowledged the vigour and purpose he has brought to India’s renewed engagement with the world. Modi’s frequent high-profile travels abroad have, in fact, generated some concern among the PM’s supporters that he is spending far too much time abroad at a time of slipping domestic primacy.

Over the last one year, Modi has shown a surprising personal enthusiasm for diplomacy and revelled in the international attention he has got. While following the broad foreign policy direction set by his predecessors, Manmohan Singh and Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Modi has been bold enough to make some important departures.

C. RAJA MOHAN

The PM’s main foreign policy objectives have been revitalisation of the stalled partnership with the United States, better management of the China challenge, more productive engagement with neighbours in the subcontinent and Asia, leveraging India’s inherent strengths in soft power and moving New Delhi towards pragmatic internationalism.

In two summits with President Barack Obama, Modi moved quickly to address differences with the US on food subsidies and nuclear liability, inject new energy into defence cooperation and signal flexibility on climate change. Discarding the defensiveness that had crept into relations with the US during the second term of the UPA, Modi, despite his visa problems with Washington, has put America at the heart of India’s international strategy. For the first time since 2005, when the UPA government signed the historic but controversial defence and nuclear agreements with America, there is renewed optimism about the future of Indo-US relations.

Just as he put ties with America back on track, Modi has begun to reset India’s relations with China. He has sought deeper economic ties with Beijing, while prudently managing the border dispute. Unlike the UPA, Modi does not view the relationships with the US and China in terms of non-alignment. He has laid out a framework of greater security cooperation with America and a strong economic partnership with China.

In the neighbourhood, Modi has got trapped in the familiar roller-coaster with Pakistan. Though he reached out to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif immediately after the elections last year, Modi later suspended talks with Pakistan, objecting to political contacts between Islamabad and separatist groups in Kashmir. If his Pakistanpolicy seemed to flip and flop, Modi has moved decisively to improve relations with smaller neighbours like Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka. He has connected directly with the political classes and people in the neighbouring countries. Above all, he has shown the will to resolve long-pending problems with them — whether it is through the development of shared water resources with Nepal or getting Parliament to approve the historic land boundary agreement with Bangladesh.

Modi has rebranded India’s “Look East” policy as “Act East”, with special emphasis on strengthening economic and security ties with Asian neighbours like Japan, Vietnam, South Korea, Australia and Mongolia. His concept of the extended neighbourhood also includes the maritime domain, as he travelled to the far seas — from Fiji in the South Pacific to Seychelles in the Western Indian Ocean.

An intensive outreach to the diaspora and promoting India’s religious and cultural links with the neighbours have been special features of Modi’s diplomacy. Although the engagement with the diaspora had begun to gain some traction since the Vajpayee years, Modi has elevated it to a new level. Equally important has been his emphasis on the projection of Indian culture abroad.

Modi’s most significant contribution could turn out to be his effort to build a new foreign policy identity for India. If India, obsessed with the notion of “strategic autonomy” in recent years, has been able to dump the residual ideological baggage on it, Modi has now begun to develop the idea of India as a “leading power”.

For decades, India saw itself as a balancing power trying to limit the West or the Chinese. Modi is now suggesting that India, with its growing national capabilities, must view itself as a power that takes greater responsibility for the construction and maintenance of the global order.

This has translated into a more self-confident engagement with the other great powers. It has also resulted in a more positive Indian approach to dealing with such global challenges as climate change, where the country was long looked at as part of the problem rather than the solution.

As a leader with a strong mandate, Modi has been well placed to impart a new momentum to India’s diplomacy. But it is by no means clear, in the middle of 2015, if Modi can engineer structural changes in the way the bureaucracy and political classes think and deal with the world. The slow pace of reforms and limited institutional capability to deliver on promises made to foreign interlocutors could re-emerge as important constraints on Modi’s diplomacy. As at home so abroad, Modi has generated expansive expectations. The current global warmth towards Modi could begin to fade if India is seen as returning to a defensive and non-performing mode.

Meanwhile, there are threats to internal peace and harmony that have not gone unnoticed in the rest of the world. The Modi government’s tolerance of the BJP’s extremist fringe and its crackdown on liberal civil society groups have begun to draw criticism, especially in the US. Unless checked decisively, the negative dynamic on the domestic front will, sooner rather than later, cloud Modi’s efforts to project India’s cultural strengths and democratic values. At the end of the first year, Modi faces a paradox: his success in creating significant external opportunities for India could easily be undermined by potential failures on the domestic front.

#ChinPak

Imagine India getting bilateral aid from one country, in one shot, of about $370 billion. That is the equivalent of Chinese President Xi Jinping's $46 billion package of offers to Pakistan, whose economy is one-eighth of India's and whose government budget is smaller than the Chinese package. The figure also exceeds by a mile the total US aid given to Pakistan in the last quarter-century. Still, it is necessary to assess the whole thing with a cool head.

The offer of eight submarines will certainly improve Pakistan's ability to practise sea denial, but will not change the military balance. Two of the submarines will be replacements for ancient boats that hark back to the 1970s, and Pakistan has just three other submarines today. India's submarine fleet, though depleted, is getting refurbished and is likely to be about twice as big at all times. The rest of Pakistan's navy consists primarily of 10 frigates, whereas India has at least 15 ships that are bigger and more capable, in a navy with 45 or 50 major combatant ships. What is politically significant is that China has now become the main supplier to Pakistan's navy, since it has also supplied its most recent frigates, and is already the main supplier of aircraft for its air force. As is well known, China has long been the key supplier for Pakistan's atomic and missile programmes as well. In many ways, Pakistan is on its way to becoming China's client state.

Much of the money mentioned during Mr Xi's visit to Pakistan is to fund electricity projects, in a country that is desperately short of power. The proposed projects, totalling 16,400 MW, will increase the country's power generation capacity by about 75 per cent - but it is less than the capacity that India has added in a year. So, despite the outsize sums involved (in relation to Pakistan's economy), these are not important in and of themselves.

The real significance of the announcements lies in China's success in roping Pakistan into its larger strategic plan for developing a naval base at Gwadar, building a multi-modal transport corridor from Xinjiang all the way to Karachi and Gwadar (through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir), and therefore breaking out of East Asia and becoming a player in West Asia. This is of course easier than it sounds, because the terrain is difficult and Baluchistan is restive; the route for the rail-road-pipeline corridor has already been changed once to avoid tribal hotspots in Pakistan's north-west. Also, as China has learnt to its cost in Myanmar, Sri Lanka and elsewhere (including parts of Africa), overweening reach-out to countries can provoke a political backlash. That may seem unlikely just now, given the "all-weather" relationship between the two countries, but Pakistan is nothing if not an unstable polity.

The lesson for India is that China's superior economic performance over the past quarter-century is the reason for this strategic outreach that is unsettling to India. If India is to deal with the new situation, then it has to start outperforming China - and not for a year or two, but on a sustained basis for the next quarter-century. For that, India needs to keep its focus on the essentials - as China has done since 1978.

The final push to end extreme #poverty

For global development, 2015 is the most important year in recent memory. In July, world leaders will gather in Addis Ababa to discuss how to finance development priorities in the years ahead. In September, heads of state meet at the United Nations to establish the Sustainable Development Goals - a group of targets and goals set for 2030. And in December, countries again will gather in Paris to work out an agreement on climate change.

This year has also seen the emergence of a major new player in development - the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bankled by China, with more than 50 countries and regions signing on as members. With the right environment, labour and procurement standards, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank - and the New Development Bank, established by theBRICS countries - can become great new forces in the economic development of poor countries and emerging markets.

We hope these new institutions will join the world's multilateral development banks and our private sector partners on a shared mission to promote economic growth that helps the poorest. The decisions we make this year, and the alliances we form in the years ahead, will help determine whether we have a chance to end extreme poverty by 2030, the central goal of the World Bank Group.

The good news is that the world has made substantial progress already. Over the past 25 years, we've gone from nearly two billion people living in extreme poverty to fewer than one billion. But that means we still have nearly one billion people living on less than $1.25 a day.

We know it's possible to end extreme poverty in the next 15 years, in part because of this past success, and because we have learned from years of experience about what has worked and what has not. As a result, our advice to governments has evolved over time. Our strategy to end extreme poverty can be summed up in just three words: Grow, invest, and insure.

First, the world economy needs to grow faster, and grow more sustainably. It needs to grow in a way that ensures that the poor receive a greater share of the benefits of that growth. We can reach the end of extreme poverty only if we mark a path toward a more robust and inclusive growth that is unparalleled in modern times.

The World Bank Group will continue to support governments and make investments in a broad variety of areas in the fight against extreme poverty. In most of the developing world, though, efforts to end extreme poverty will require us to focus on boosting agricultural productivity.

Helping farmers improve yields requires increasing access to better seeds, water, electricity and markets. According to one study in Bangladesh, six years after constructing 3,000 km of roads to connect communities to markets, household incomes increased by an average of 74 per cent.

That's the growth part of the strategy. The second part of the strategy is to invest - and by that, I mean investing in people, especially through education and health.

The opportunity to get children off to the right start happens just once. Investments made in children early in life bring far greater returns than those made later on. Poor nutrition and disease can have life-long implications for mental and physical health, educational achievement and adult earnings.

The final part of the strategy is to insure. This means that governments must provide social safety nets as well as build systems to protect against disasters and the rapid spread of disease.

Ebola revealed the shortcomings of international and national systems to prevent, detect, and respond to infectious disease outbreaks. Ebola also taught us that the poor are likely to suffer the most from pandemics. The World Bank Group has been working with partners on a new concept that would provide much needed rapid response financing in the face of an outbreak, where countries would receive rapid disbursements of funding, which would, in turn, help contain outbreaks, save lives and protect economies.

We know that ending extreme poverty will be extraordinarily difficult - in fact, the closer we get to our goal, the more difficult it will be.

Governments of the world must seize this moment. Our private sector partners must step up. The World Bank Group, our multilateral development bank partners, and our new partners on the horizon, must all seize this moment. We must now collaborate with real conviction and distinguish our generation as the one that ended poverty.

We are the first generation in human history that can end extreme poverty. This is our great challenge, and our great opportunity. The final push must begin right now.

Chinese Takeaway: Border Paradox

As it looks at the southwestern frontiers with India and its neighbours in the subcontinent, China stares at a paradox. China has ambitious plans to develop mega trans-border projects with Myanmar in the east and Pakistan in the west. China has already built a twin pipeline system running from Myanmar’s Bay of Bengal coast to the Yunnan province. It is now ready to pour massive resources into the development of a Pakistan-China economic corridor. China has long seen Myanmar and Pakistan as gateways to the Indian Ocean.

Beijing has a settled boundary with Myanmar and has no arguments with Pakistan about their frontier. But political turbulence has made China’s borders with Myanmar and Pakistan increasingly insecure. Despite anxieties on frequent incursions across the disputed portions of the Sino-Indian border, there is no violence on the undemarcated Line of Actual Control that separates Indian and Chinese forces in the Himalayas. Yet, there has been no serious effort to change the economic nature of the Sino-Indian frontier.

In India’s east, the ongoing war between Yangon and ethnic Chinese rebels, called the Kokang, in northern Myanmar has spilled over into the bordering Yunnan province in China. Earlier this month, the two sides agreed to jointly investigate an incident in which Myanmarese bombs fell on the Chinese side of the border, killing a few farmers. This has put Beijing in a dilemma. Beijing can’t appear to be soft in the face of presumed violations of its territorial sovereignty. Chinese leaders also can’t be seen as doing nothing when ethnic Chinese groups are a target of state violence. At the same time, a muscular response will inflame nationalism in Myanmar and make matters worse. It will add Myanmar to the list of Asian countries, including Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam, which have deepening border disputes with China. Beijing had tried in the past to mediate between the Myanmar government and the Kokang.

To our west, China is troubled by the deepening turbulence in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and its impact on the stability of the Xinjiang province, where Muslim Uighurs have become increasingly restive. In order to secure its southwestern frontiers, China is expanding its involvement in the Afghan peace process. It is trying to facilitate a dialogue between the Afghan government and the Taliban, and promote reconciliation between Kabul and Rawalpindi.But Myanmar does not see China as a neutral party and believes there is considerable support from across the Chinese border to the Kokang.

Many analysts around the world believe that Beijing is in a much better position than Washington to nudge all parties towards peace in Afghanistan, given its special relationship with Pakistan — often described as “higher than the Himalayas and deeper than the Indian Ocean”. Others are not so certain. They see the Pakistan army using China to promote Rawalpindi’s interests across the Durand Line, rather than China’s. Put simply, China could merely end up replacing America as Rawalpindi’s new sucker in Afghanistan.

Money and Love
Recent developments in Myanmar and Sri Lanka have undermined the proposition that China can buy political love in the subcontinent by simply investing large sums of money in mega infrastructure projects. It has been conventional wisdom for a while that China is the closest external partner to Yangon and Colombo. But internal political change in both countries has put some key Chinese projects on hold. Uncertainty in Beijing’s bilateral political relations with Yangon and Colombo has inevitably followed.

More broadly, China’s cheque-book diplomacy and project-building in distant lands have come under stress as many of its partners — from Ukraine to Venezuela and Ecuador to Argentina — drift into financial straits and find themselves unable to repay loans. Meanwhile, others in Sri Lanka have questioned the terms and viability of Chinese-supported projects.

Massive hard currency reserves and excess industrial capacity at home, it appeared, had put Beijing in a powerful position to take up ambitious infrastructure projects beyond its borders. But politics and economics continue to complicate the translation of Chinese assets into concrete outcomes.

India Option
As New Delhi and Beijing seek a productive economic agenda for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to China in May, there is no way of missing the fit between China’s capacities and India’s infrastructure needs, both at home and across borders. While China has been seeking India’s support for its Silk Road initiatives, Delhi has been reluctant to get on board. Modi, however, has signalled a more open approach to economic engagement with China.

Unlike many other countries where China is making risky investments, Delhi is a more credible long-term economic partner for Beijing. If China is ready for a genuine consultative approach with India and is willing to facilitate serious tie-ups between companies in both countries, Modi should embrace President Xi Jinping’s Silk Road initiative.

#Reservations, questions

The Supreme Court judgment in Ram Singh and Ors vs Union of India is a welcome check on the arbitrary ways in which caste groups have been included in the #OBC lists. The judgment recognises that the demand for inclusion is driven in some cases by the pure political power of a group. Such inclusions make a mockery of reservations. They deny other backward groups fair opportunity. They muddy the normative objective of reservation policy. By insisting on standards of justification, the judgment will hopefully slow down the tendency to indiscriminately include politically powerful groups under the OBC ambit. The judgment is salutary in its appreciation of changing social realities and the need for more sophistication in thinking about the criteria used to include new groups. But in this judgment, and other recent ones, there are new frameworks struggling to come out. The implications of these frameworks are not clear.

The first is the framework of historical injustice. In one careful formulation, the court says that keeping in mind “only historical injustice would certainly result in under-protection of the most deserving class of backward citizens”. But in a slightly more far-reaching formulation, it says the “attention of the state must be concentrated to discover such [meaning new] groups rather than to enable groups of citizens to recover ‘lost ground’ in claiming preference or benefits on the basis of historical prejudice”. In the context of this case, this is a surprising claim. Historical injustice was never the dominant argument in the case of OBCs. They managed to appropriate a narrative of victimhood and discrimination that, in the fullest measure, belonged to Dalits. That even the Supreme Court manages to conflate them is a measure of the success of that ideological appropriation. The scope of the court’s claim is not clear. Presumably, it does not mean that historical injustice is not sufficient for SCs. If interpreted in the broad way that it is written then the judgment is not just a rationalisation of who gets included in the OBC category; it could be the first judicial step in dismantling the current structure of SC reservation. But the distinction between SCs and OBCs should remain judicially important.

The second issue is the knowledge production framework on caste. One of the issues in contention was whether the government could override the recommendations of the National Commission for Backward Classes (NCBC). Under the NCBC Act, the government can override the recommendations of the commission, provided it has compelling reasons. The court did not find the government’s reasons compelling. Part of the issue at stake is, who is the authoritative producer of knowledge on this subject? There are many entities: professional academic studies, commissioned agencieslike the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), previous government reports, the NCBC itself as an arbiter of knowledge, submissions by citizens themselves and, in the final analysis, the court taking a call on whether certain reasons are compelling in light of available knowledge. Part of what seems to be at play is the way in which none of these institutions seems to establish its credibility; each is impugning the other on some ground. The NCBC does not trust some academic surveys, ostensibly because they were biased (in a conflation of reason and identity, if a Jat does a survey on Jats, it appears to be suspicious). The state governments weigh knowledge differently, the ICSSR is non-committal, citizen data has to be mediated and finally the Supreme Court decides, without argument, that 10-year-old data cannot be validly invoked (the court clearly has no sense of just how difficult empirical research is).

But there is a deeper problem. There is a range of criteria for backwardness at play, from economic power to social mores. The question of what weight to allot different criteria depends on your assumptions about social change and normative commitments. The significance of data is not independent of a framework. These are never made explicit in a methodologically rigorous way. The court has decided the government cannot be trusted mediate between different knowledge producing entities. But is there any reason to suppose that the court is in any better position? This point is of wider relevance since the court is now doing so much knowledge mediation, without the tools to do so.

The third area is the framework of categories that capture backwardness. In both Ram Singh and the now notorious K.P. Manu vs Chairman Scrutiny Committee, the court seems to be pushing this thought. There are deprived and discriminated groups that are not captured by our traditional categories of caste, nor are those groups confined to one religion. Transgenders are cited as one example. What conceptual framework, beyond caste and religion, will capture them? Manu, however, was caught in other absurdities, that a “reconvert” can claim their former caste status if the “former” caste accepts them back into their fold. Whether or not you are entitled to reservation in this instance depends, not on discrimination and deprivation, but on whether a community accepts you back into its fold. This is distinctly odd. But along with Ram Singh, it is acknowledging the need for new categories.

The court hints at a new paradigm of backwardness that, while not ignoring caste, goes beyond it. It does not want backwardness to be based on perception. Backwardness cannot be determined merely on the basis of comparison with existing groups in flawed lists. More intriguingly, it says backwardness cannot be based on “mathematical formulae evolved by taking into account social, economic or educational indicators”. It is not clear what this means. It seems to rule out most current methodologies for identifying backwardness. On one interpretation, the court seems to be saying that in aproper reservation scheme, mere underrepresentation, though relevant, should not be sufficient. There has to be some judgement on the causes. A community that remains backward because misogyny prevents female education requires different remedies from a community actively discriminated against. But how much space is it opening up for new criteria? Rakesh Basant has, for example, proposed that the level of parents’ education is a good predictor of opportunity and is also easy to operationalise as a criteria for who should get benefits. Would that pass these tests?

In its plea to identify new groups rather than historical ones, the court seems to be moving towards the thought that discrimination needs to be part of the judgement of which groups are entitled. But the irony of reservations is that it counted heads, but never tackled the problem of discrimination. The only thing certain about the reservation debate is that every judgment opens more questions than it answers.