Indian poverty linked to religion and caste

New report highlights how minorities do the most stigmatized and lowly paid work in Hindu-majority India

Umar Manzoor Shah, New Delhi India June 17, 2019

For 20 years, Ratna Devi was paid no more than 50 rupees (about US$1) a day for her eight hours of work in a brick kiln.

The 52-year-old is now bedridden in her shanty home on the outskirts of Indian capital New Delhi after developing various ailments including asthma.

“My sons and their wives work in the same brick kiln now,” said Devi, who belongs to the Dalit community, a socially poor group formerly branded as so-called untouchables. “They aren’t paid any more than what I used to get as my daily wage.”

A new report by Oxfam, a confederation of 20 developmental organizations, points to a strong correlation between poverty and social identity.

The report released this month, titled “Mind the Gap: The State of Employment in India 2019,” stresses that India’s poor are most likely to be Dalits, other so-called lower castes, tribal people and Muslims. A central finding is that the poor are still discriminated against on the basis of their religion or caste.

More than 80 percent of India’s workforce are in the unorganized sector and have little or no social security protection, government figures show.

Of India’s 465 million workers, only 28 million were in the organized sector and the remaining 437 million were in the unorganized sector, according to National Sample Survey Organization data for 2010.

Only 16 percentage of Muslim workers in the unorganized sector received social security, while 26 percent of those classified as Hindu workers had access to social security payments.

When all workers were considered, only 4.68 percent of tribal people had access to any social security, followed by 5.78 percent of Dalits and other lower-caste workers, the Oxfam report states.

Of the unorganized workers, a majority, or 246 million, are employed in the agricultural sector, with some 44 million in construction and those remaining in manufacturing and the provision of services.

Diya Dutta, a researcher at Oxfam India, told ucanews.com that the new report highlights some of the structural barriers to better job opportunities and upward mobility for minorities.

Outside rural India, there are various occupational markers that reflect discrimination on the grounds of social identity.

For example, there are about 5 million full-time equivalents of sanitation workers who are predominantly Dalits, Dutta said.

Sumeet Mhaskar, associate professor at the O.P. Jindal Global University, says that in contrast to the higher castes in India, individuals from disadvantaged castes such as Dalits remain largely restricted to menial work traditionally considered as unclean. “The situation of poor Muslims is quite similar,” he said.

Their lack of political patronage, and negative perceptions among non-Muslims, forced Muslims to work in what he called a “ghettoized economy.”

Imtiyaz Qureshi, a rights activist based in India’s northern state of Uttar Pradesh, says the majority of Dalits and economically downtrodden Muslims work in stigmatized occupations such as scavenging, rag picking, scrap metal collection, butchering and the leather industry, including tanning.

“These occupations belong to the informal sector of the country which has more than 90 percent of the Indian workforce,” Qureshi told ucanews.com.

The butchering of all meat has a stigma attached to it, says Pavan Kumar, a Dalit rights activist. He says that in recent years this occupation has for many Dalits and Muslims become “no less than a death trap.”

Kumar said Muslim and Dalit communities involved in animal slaughter face being lynched by extremist Hindu cow vigilantes, some of whom enjoy state patronage. “The cow vigilantes under the pretext of cow protection have unleashed a series of violent attacks against Dalits and Muslims,” he said.

Last year, 33 people were killed and 100 were injured in cases of related mob violence. That constituted ia 450 percent rise in the number of attacks and a 200 per cent rise in deaths due to mob attacks compared to 2017, he said.

Bezwada Wilson is national convener of human rights organization Safai Karmachari Andolan, which campaigns for an end to so-called manual scavenging, a term used for the removal of untreated human excreta from bucket toilets and pit latrines.

Wilson told ucanews.com there are about 5 million sanitation workers that predominantly come from Dalit communities in India and about half of them face occupational hazards. 

He said the deaths of about 1,800 such workers in India during the last decade was related to their job of removing human waste.

“The government is acting as a proverbial ostrich and wants to downplay the crisis only because the manual scavengers are Dalits and not from the upper castes,” Wilson said.

According to the country’s 2011 census, around 2.1 million households dispose of their waste in dry latrines or drains, which are cleaned by manual scavengers.

The Socio-Economic Caste Census conducted in the same year revealed that about 182,000 families had at least one member employed in manual scavenging.

Some 60 percent of India’s 28 million Christians come from Dalit or tribal backgrounds, particularly in northern India.

Dalits comprise 16.6 percent of India’s 1.2 billion people. They are most prevalent as a proportion of the state population in northern Punjab, at about 32 percent, while Mizoram in the northeast has next to none.

Hindus constitute some 966 million or 80 percent of the population, followed by Muslims, who number some 172 million or 14.2 percent of the population.