IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/
MyIDEAS: Login to save this paper or follow this series

The Demand for Disadvantage

Author Info

  • Rohini Somanathan

    (Department of Economics, Delhi School of Economics, Delhi, India)

Abstract

Disadvantage is a popular and controversial word in India these days. In October 2007, half a million Gujars, traditionally a pastoral community of north and central India, filled the streets of several towns in the Indian state of Rajasthan demanding that they be classified by their state government as disadvantaged. The Gujars wish to be listed as Scheduled Tribes, and thereby receive greater parliamentary representation, preferential treatment in public employment and lower admissions standards in many educational institutions.1 Yet, ethnographers have cast doubt on their aboriginal descent, they share customs with other groups in the middle of the social ladder,2 and a current web site hosted by members of the Gujar community refers to the group as “a proud people” with “the desire and ability to rule the world”3. The case of the Gujars illustrates, oddly but powerfully, the ways in which culture and politics mingle to shape acceptable notions of social justice and government policy in democracies. In a poor, growing economy with academic costs well below the market value of educational training, the tag of disadvantage has come to acquire value and, ironically, the desire for mobility has brought about a demand to be classified as disadvantaged. It is this demand that I would like to reflect upon here- its cultural roots, its social rationale, the political mechanisms through which it is expressed and some of the economic implications of the policies that it has generated.

Download Info

If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.

File URL: http://www.cdedse.org/pdf/work169.pdf
Download Restriction: no

Paper provided by Centre for Development Economics, Delhi School of Economics in its series Working papers with number 169.

as
in new window

Length: 21 pages
Date of creation: Jul 2008
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:cde:cdewps:169
Contact details of provider: Postal: Delhi 110 007
Phone: (011) 27667005
Fax: (011) 27667159
Web page: http://www.cdedse.org/Email:


More information through EDIRC

Order Information: Web: http://www.cdedse.org/ Email:


Keywords: Shapley value; potential; consistency; games in partition function form.Goup-based policies of preferential treatment began under British rule in the first half of the twentieth century. After political independence in 1947; the Indian constitution converting some of these policies into rights; facilitated the expansion of state-led affirmative action. The constitution was unusual in that it juxtaposed provisions for the equality of all citizens before the law with those that mandated the proportional political representation of specific groups and allowed the state to make special concessions for their advancement. In the decades that followed; these provisions did dilute the dominance of the traditionally elite in political and social life but also generated caste-based contests for the rents from public office and the gains from spending on public goods. Mandated political representation and other types of affirmative action changed the balance of power but also created new types of inequalities within the set of targeted communities. Demographic data from the census; public employment and college admission records; and studies of electoral outcomes all suggest that the minimally disadvantaged and the numerically strong communities benefitted more than the others. The constitutional space given to affirmative action was initially valuable because it encouraged the state to acknowledge its responsibility towards the socially marginalized. Over time however; it has created a peculiar discourse of social justice and development in India in which individual advancement is linked to group mobility and groups move forward by claiming that they have been left behind. In the process; the state has neglected less controversial and more fundamental rights such as the universal access to primary and secondary education that may have done more for larger numbers of truly disadvantaged communities. Section 2 describes the constitutional basis for affirmative action policies in India and provides a brief history of these policies. Section 3 presents secondary evidence on the characteristics of beneficiaries and the distribution of benefits. It also documents the inequality in educational attainment that emerged within the set of communities that were targeted as recipient of affirmative action over the 1931-1991 period. I conclude in Section 4 with reflections on the divergence between the intended and actual effects of affirmative action in India.;

No references listed on IDEAS
You can help add them by filling out this form.

Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.

as in new window


Cited by:

  1. Jean-Marie Baland & Rohini Somanathan & Lore Vandewalle, 2011. "Socially Disadvantaged Groups and Microfinance in India," Working Papers 1117, University of Namur, Department of Economics.

This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.

Access and download statistics

When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cde:cdewps:169. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Sanjeev Sharma)

If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.

If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.

If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

This information is provided to you by IDEAS at the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis using RePEc data.