On the 60th Anniversary of Independence of India & Pakistan, I have this question:
Independence from what ?
Malnutriution: Both countries have among the highest malnutrituion rates in the world (even beating poor sub-saharan Africa). 50%. Just imagine 1 in 2 children in India are malnourished. At young age their oppurtunity to acheive anything is life is almost taken away ...
Women's Discrimination: South Asia has the worst record in the world on this account. It has among the lowest (less than 50%) female literacy rate, difference in number of school years between boys and girls is highest among the world, women's health is absymal, job opportunities are worse (most of the unorganized sector is composed of women).
Dalit Discrimination: Middle class has a tendency of saying that India does not discriminate now and reservations are all wrong. In a recent survey of discrimination in rural India it was found that
"Almost
27.6 per cent dalits are prevented from entering
police stations and 25.7 from ration shops; 33 per cent
public health workers refuse to visit dalit homes, and
23.5 per cent dalits still do not get letters delivered
to their homes. Segregated seating for dalits was found
in 30.8 per cent self-help groups and cooperatives, and
29.6 per cent panchayat offices. In 14.4 per cent
villages, dalits were not permitted to enter the
panchayat building. They were denied access to polling
booths, or forced to form separate lines in 12 per cent
of the villages surveyed." (Refer to article below for more details)
I can go on and on .... There are so many aspects we are unfree. Its a shame ....
Agreed that India's GDP growth is more than 8% for past two years, poverty has reduced (though who knows how much), we have the highest number of millionaries/billionaries in Asia (Economic times report), we are knowledge centers of world and what not. But does this all matter and hold infront of these other facts above. To me thats a definate NO.
What do you think?
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Attaching an excellent article by Harsh mander:
Cry Freedom!
Harsh Mander
In a dilapidated slum shanty near the banks of the Ganga
in Patna is settled a group of families whose profession
is to clean dry toilets with their bare hands, and to
carry human waste on their heads to throw into the
forgiving waters of the mighty river. I found that not a
single child studied in the government school, which, as
it happened, was located literally just across the road
from the scavenger colony. It took a while to coax from
the guardians the reason for their steady resolve to
keep their children away from school. It transpired that
they had indeed sent their children to the school
initially. It is a custom in many government schools for
the teacher to send children on errands. The upper-caste
children were assigned tasks such as to fetch tea. The
children from the scavenger colony were asked to wash
the toilets, or to clean up after a dog had soiled the
school premises. The children could not bear the shame,
and refused to return to the school.
Of the many forms of untouchability that persist in
modern India, unarguably the most unconscionable is the
wide prevalence of discrimination against dalit children
within schools. Children in rural India, and even parts
of the cities, learn early the rules of caste, which
survive unremittingly through their lifetimes, even as
their country races into the 21st century. A survey of
practices of untouchability undertaken in 565 villages
in 11 major states of India reveals shockingly that in
as many as 38 per cent government schools, dalit
children are made to sit separately while eating. In 20
per cent schools, dalit children are not even permitted
to drink water from the same source.
As the outcome of a major direction of the Supreme Court
of India, millions of children in most government
primary schools in the country are being provided hot,
cooked, mid-day meals everyday. The mid-day meal
programme not only strengthens the nutrition of children
in government schools, many of whom are poor and do not
have access to sufficient and nutritious food in their
homes, it also encourages enrolment into schools,
retention and regular attendance.
But an equally important outcome is that since children
of all castes and classes sit together and eat, it
teaches them caste equality. Traditionally, caste and
communal barriers are expressed most in the refusal to
eat together; therefore, people of diversity sitting
together gently can shatter a range of iniquitous social
practices, and what better place for this to happen than
the school?
However, there are disturbing field studies of caste
discrimination within schools. Caste discrimination in
mid-day meals is seen in various ways. The first is
defiance of the Supreme Court orders to appoint cooks
from dalit backgrounds. In states like Tamil Nadu only
14 per cent of the cooks are dalit.
In many places where, although, dalit cooks have been
appointed, upper-caste parents retaliated by not
allowing their children to eat the meal, threatening to
withdraw, putting pressure to replace the cook with an
upper-caste cook and so on.
The other forms of discrimination are where children
are not allowed to sit together and eat. Dalit children
are required to sit apart from the dominant caste
children; sometimes apart within the same space, other
times outside of the school building while the dominant
caste children sit inside, or on a lower level than
their dominant caste peers. Some studies have also
shown that dalit children are required to bring their
own plates and/or are given less quantity of food,
refused a second serving, not allowed to drink water
from the public taps and hand pump at the school and
so on.
The recently released report of perhaps the first
nationwide survey of the continued prevalence of
untouchability, jointly authored by social scientists
Ghanshyam Shah, Sukhadeo Thorat, Satish Deshpande,
Amita Baviskar and myself
(Untouchability in Rural India, Sage), finds such
untouchability in all local state institutions. Almost
27.6 per cent dalits are prevented from entering
police stations and 25.7 from ration shops; 33 per cent
public health workers refuse to visit dalit homes, and
23.5 per cent dalits still do not get letters delivered
to their homes. Segregated seating for dalits was found
in 30.8 per cent self-help groups and cooperatives, and
29.6 per cent panchayat offices. In 14.4 per cent
villages, dalits were not permitted to enter the
panchayat building. They were denied access to polling
booths, or forced to form separate lines in 12 per cent
of the villages surveyed. Despite being charged with a
constitutional mandate to promote social justice, local
institutions of the Indian State facilitate
untouchability.
Dalit settlements are often segregated from the main
village, and these traditions are reproduced even by
the government, when building Indira Awaas housing
colonies for dalits or by NGOs, post-2001 earthquake
reconstruction in Gujarat. In nearly half the surveyed
villages (48.4 per cent), dalits were denied access to
water sources. In over a third (35.8 per cent), dalits
were denied entry into village shops. They had to wait
some distance from the shop, the shopkeepers kept the
goods they bought on the ground, and accepted their
money similarly without direct contact. In teashops, in
about one-third of the villages, dalits were denied
seating and had to use separate cups.
In more than 47 per cent villages, bans operated on
wedding processions on public (arrogated as upper-caste)
roads. In 10 to 20 per cent villages, dalits were not
allowed to wear clean or bright clothes or sunglasses.
They could not ride their bicycles, unfurl their
umbrellas, wear chappals on public roads, smoke or even
stand without head bowed.
We found that restrictions on entry by dalits into Hindu
temples were as high as an average of 64 per cent in 11
states, ranging from 47 per cent in UP to 94 per cent in
Karnataka. Such restrictions endured even after
conversion of dalits to egalitarian faiths. As many as 41
of the 51 villages surveyed in Punjab reported separate
gurudwaras for dalit Sikhs, and even where dalits
worshipped in gurudwaras frequented by upper caste jats,
they were served in separate lines at the langar, and
were not permitted to prepare or serve the sacred food.
In Maharashtra, despite mass conversions of Mahars to
Buddhism, dalits were denied temple entry in 51 per cent
villages. Reports from Kerala and Andhra Pradesh
chronicled divisions in the church between dalit converts
and others, even discrimination against ordained dalit
priests.
Untouchability persists even into death; in half the
villages (48.9 per cent) dalits were debarred from access
to cremation grounds. In Maharashtra, even where dalits
have their segregated cremation grounds, these are
permitted only on the eastern side of the village, so
that upper castes are not polluted by the winds that pass
from west to east.
The study reports discrimination against dalits even in
the labour market. Although normally dalits are coerced
into agricultural labour in unfavourable conditions,
sometimes even of bondage, they are excluded in the lean
agricultural season when work is scarce, and therefore
upper-caste workers are preferred. In 25 per cent of the
villages, dalits were paid lower wages than other workers.
They were subjected to longer working hours, delayed wages,
verbal and physical abuse, not just in 'feudal' states
like Bihar but notably in Punjab. In 37 per cent of the
villages, dalits were paid wages from a distance, to avoid
physical contact. The study found evidence of
discrimination between non-dalit and dalit workers,
evidence of caste surmounting proletarian solidarity.
Although the large majority of dalits are landless, even
in the fewer cases where dalits were landowners, they were
denied access to water for irrigation in more than
one-third of the villages. In 21 per cent villages, they
were denied access to grazing lands and fishing ponds, and
violent upper caste opposition was reported when dalits
were allotted government lands for cultivation or even
housing.
Untouchability extended even to consumer markets with
dalit producers in 35 per cent villages barred from
selling their produce in local markets. They were forced
to sell in the anonymity of distant urban markets where
caste identities blur, but this additional burden of costs
and time reduced their competitiveness. Caste taboos apply
particularly to products like milk, so that in 47 per cent
of the villages with cooperatives, dalits were not allowed
to sell milk to the co-operatives or even private buyers.
In a quarter of the villages, they were prevented from
buying milk from cooperatives. Dalits are not only
disproportionately burdened with poverty to start with,
caste discrimination in labour and consumer markets
condemn them to lower wages with harder work in uncertain
employment, and restrictions on their access to natural
resources as well as markets for their products.
With untouchability persisting unashamedly in State
institutions like schools and police stations, in public
spaces like temples and shops, in farms and markets, and
in homes and hearts, the dalit still lives in India
waiting hopelessly, and sometimes in anger, for the long
betrayed dawn of equality.
The writer is a former civil servant and Convener, Aman Biradari
