Mon, Oct 04, 2004 page10

• Caste system thwarts `untouchables' in India

  • THE GUARDIAN
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  Flanked by green cricket fields where he once played and a university from which he graduated, Arvind Vaghela tries not to notice the stream of students walking past. "I used to be like them, attending lectures and going out on the fields. But now I just hide my face," he said.

  The reason for his shame is the broom in his hand. Despite a masters degree in economics from Gujarat University in Ahmedabad, the best job Vaghela, 24, could get was one done by generations of his family: roadsweeper.

  "I wanted to work in sales for a bank, but you needed to have your own vehicle. I come from a poor family, so how could I afford that? When my father died I was offered his job and I took it," he said.

  As a Dalit, or untouchable, Vaghela's story is familiar in this sprawling west Indian city. Nearly 100 of its council sanitation workers have degrees in subjects ranging from computing to law, but cannot get better jobs because they are Dalits.

  Their experience is part of an increasingly heated debate in India, where the government has announced that it will consider extending public-sector job quotas for people from the lowest castes to the private sector.

  Industrialists, who insist private-sector jobs and promotions are earned on merit, say that this will make businesses inefficient and uncompetitive.

  Rahul Bajaj, who chairs a large motorcycle manufacturer, wrote in the Times of India that public-sector job quotas had reduced the "effectiveness of government" because decisions were not made on the basis of ability.

  This argument leaves Ahmedabad's roadsweeping graduates unimpressed. Most say that they have had to face discrimination or exploitation in the private sector.

  "I got a job with a firm of accountants and then had to present my qualifications. On one school certificate it mentioned my caste.

  "The next day I was told there had been a mistake -- I was not required any more," said Dalit sweeper Prakash Chauhan, 32, who has a a degree in commerce.

  Chauhan stresses he is relatively well paid, at 4,000 rupees (US$87) a month, and his job is secure.

  "This is a job for life. But it was my father's life. Our parents had a dream that education would mean we would not have to do the jobs they did. It did not turn out that way," he said.

  Dalits, the lowest caste, have endured centuries of discrimination and violence because of a social order that consigns them and their descendants to jobs nobody else wants and a tradition that all humans are created unequal.

  In rural India Dalits have been murdered for proposing to marry somebody further up the social ladder, barred from temples, forced into bonded labor and made to carry human waste from the homes of high-caste Hindus.

  In the cities, where it is easier to change one's name and slip into the crowd, Dalits say economic exclusion is now the biggest issue.

  The ingrained unfairness of the caste system has brought pressure for reform on human rights grounds against Western firms doing business in India. Unions have written to 300 companies in Europe which outsource work to India to check that their subcontractors do not discriminate on the basis of caste.

  "There are many parallels with the situation in South Africa in the [1960s], when foreign companies needed to be persuaded to address the discrimination in the system of apartheid,' said David Haslam, the London-based chair of the Dalit Solidarity Network.

  Chandra Bhan Prasad, a Dalit writer, says businesses should look for inspiration to the US, where firms carry out diversity audits and give contracts to firms from minority groups.
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