Over 90% of Indian techies in the US are upper-caste Indians

In my University (IIT-D), I believe certain scholarship announcements revealed details about students' categories, ie whether they were SC/ST/OBC/General. Especially if it were a means scholarship.

Worse case, professors in India have zero personality training, and will casually ask such questions of their students.

https://www.edexlive.com/news/2019/aug/18/caste-in-stone-why...

The students from lower-caste communities usually are also from low-income families and lack proper guidance (partly because the parents are not educated) compared to students from upper-class communities.

The reservation in academia is relevant to uplift people who are from disadvantaged communities. The society as a whole whould benefit from it.

IMO, there are valid criticism of implementation details of reservation for lower-caste in India, such as:

* should a person who belongs to lower-caste get eligibility for reserved quota if that person's parents also benefited from reserved quota?

* should caste based reservation be allowed in instances that require highly specialized skills? As opposed to equal treatment based on only merit. (Example: admissions to MD, Govt. jobs that requires highly specialized skills)

You can criticise implementation details of the reservation-system used as a tool by the Government to correct historical imbalance in society but not the idea as a whole because the system in place is showing positive results. We have made a lot progress in last few decades but still a long way to go in good direction. This is my opinion as an Indian techie from an upper-caste family.

Edit: typos / grammar

> I agree. It shouldn't be. But then it shouldn't be relevant during admissions too yeh?

I interpreted the situation the GP described as a policy meant to enable bigoted discrimination. The bad part is the bigotry, not the discrimination.

Discrimination meant to relieve the effects of past bigotry on disadvantaged people is not a bad kind of discrimination. Meritocracy isn't a fair competition if some families already got a head start before it was decided the rules should be made fair and were allowed to keep it.

Not sure about IITs, I went to one of the top NITs and thats definitely not the case with people not being able graduate in 4 years. I have personally seen examples of people completely uplifting their family from poverty by the chance they have gotten via reservation.

Disclaimer: I am neither upper caste nor lower, somewhere in the middle, I guess and have not been positively or adversely impacted because of my caste.

It is not the goal of the reservation system to eliminate caste-based bias. The goal is to eliminate unfair competition by ensuring candidates of equal backgrounds compete with each other. A low caste candidate who was historically denied education can not compete with a higher caste student from an educated family. Hence the candidates are categorized based on their caste background such as BC, SC/ST etc and they compete within those categories. A BC candidate competes with other BC candidates, a SC with other SCs and so on.

Drawing from the analogy posted elsewhere in this thread. This is roughly comparable to the weight divisions in boxing. The divisions exist because it is unfair to let a lightweight boxer fight a heavyweight fighter. Without weight divisions, the competition is favorable to the heavyweights, which was the case before the reservation system.

Saying reservation should be based on economic status rather than caste is akin to saying boxers should be categorized based on height instead of weight. Economic status is less relevant here because it does not directly affect the chances of success. In a math competition, the candidate born in a family of upper class math teachers has an advantage over a candidate born to rich but uneducated parents who were denied education for generations.

The idea of reservation is to provide opportunity to people who were denied opportunity in the name of caste. They were not denied opportunity because they were poor, but because they were from a low caste. When discrimination was based on caste the remedy should also based on caste. Moreover, economic status is transient, where as the caste is rigid. A poor family can become rich but a low caste person can never become a upper caste as the caste is decided on birth. It is not sound to say a person from a caste who was oppressed for thousands of years should not be given reservation because they become rich in the last generation.

Even with this low bar SC&ST are unable to get in. It shows how disadvantaged they are as a population.

Would love a believable citation (which means not from standard rightwing mouthpieces).

I can believe that it did not eliminate it. That's a tall task that will take time.

Does upper caste society acknowledge the private reservations it has had for years?

https://scroll.in/article/951818/does-upper-caste-society-ac...

As a person from an upper caste background may I ask you why you think the criteria for reservation should be economic when the bias is because of caste?

I know multiple friends of mine who have suffered innumerable abuse and indignities because of their caste and irrespective of their educational qualifications.

Ambedkar - the chap who wrote the constitution, was ill treated even after his Columbia degree and his PhD. Customers refused to sign him on and colleagues refused to even share the same room with him when he taught as a professor.

It is sad that even in this time and day when we see so much caste oppression the upper castes still continue to refuse to admit it.

By the way, I have never benefited from any reservation of any kind.

Does Canada allow an Indian national to approve visa applications?

How did you know the surnames of all the other people in the room?

This is what I've been told when I was in India.

I am happily married with my partner who is from another caste and we don't plan on carrying forward this caste nonsense with our children.

If someone writes JEE, it is likely they have spent a lot for coaching / study materials, and it is likely they don't deserve reservation.

My initial reaction was that this was some sort of joke.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creamy_layer

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/topic/OBC-creamy-layer

And if you want to practice caste discrimination at an Indian company — beware, caste based discrimination is India has been illegal since 1948, you will go to jail, and they’re definitely not the nice Scandinavian kind of jails.

PS. About education and affirmative action for Dalits... there are lots of such programmes. But clearly not enough to wipe this blot away.

I agree, but as usual, I'm confused: should they not be demoted or fired when they abuse their power to discriminate against someone who is not Indian? Or is Indian, but of an equal or higher caste?

I totally agree with what you're saying, but the way you say it implies that everything else is okay.

> If you want to work in an environment where caste matters and the caste hierarchy is observed, do not work for a western company.

We have castes in the West as well, we just call them classes and you can, theoretically, transition from one to another, but generally you won't and everybody is quite aware of each others class and the nuances within. It's in everything, the way you speak, dress, what you eat and drink, heck, even your name is usually a statement of class.

But I can see how many Indians would find it awkward to talk about, especially if they think that the caste system is on it's way out because things are better than they used to be. Some might feel that discussing it with non-Indians puts India in a bad light.

To which I say, it's not me who's painting India in a bad light, it's the people who are discriminating on the basis of caste in 2020. People who say "oh, I'm only against reservation and those who benefit from it" and treat such people terribly. And we can only get rid of this disease by shining a light on it.

https://pulitzercenter.org/reporting/no-escape-caste-these-s...

https://www.swindia.us/the-caste-system-of-india/

On the way back, she started asking questions about my background. They grew intensely personal. Until she was interrogating me on the sidewalk.

Unsatisfied with my responses, she just gave up and cut to the chase, "What's your mother's caste?"

Thanks to fairly unique circumstances I have to live with a plausible cover story. Because Indian people cannot stop asking questions. Where are you from? Where were you born? Why's your skin so pale? Why're you so tall? Where are your parents? What do they do? Where did you go to school? Why aren't you married?

What's worse is that the society is insular. Even in a big city, few people socialize outside of, in descending order of proximity, family > friends of the family > classmates from elementary school > people from their high school > college > (perhaps, sometimes) work.

I have met people who have gone through their entire life without ever meeting someone from a lower social class. Casual greetings with people who clean their homes don't count.

There's a lack of je ne sais quoi. A certain lack of creative energy. A kind of absence of the meeting of free radicals that sparks interesting ideas and art. Culturally, it's as if, the society has submerged itself in halon, determined to not let the sparks of creativity and genius spark.

This problem is so acute that every free radical I've met has done their very best to move away as soon as humanly possible.

I have no voice and yet I must scream

Its not just promotions. It manifests every where. Job interviews, bonus payouts, onsite foreign work opportunities.

If you are a part of a minority group you are expected to be just too awesome compared to your peer groups to even qualify for basic things.

The whole system works in a way that you have to continually outperform your peer group to even qualify working at the current levels. When people say the system is merit based(It's not), they basically mean its a ruthless culling process where even small missteps from a minority person could mean the person losing years.

Different states in India differ in matters of caste substantially. In Bengal its mostly a non-issue, more so in metropolitan areas. Some from grand-parent generations might still give caste a thought, but for the rest I can bet that thoughts of caste rarely if at all cone to their mind.

To cement this idea with a concrete example, the Brahmin's that you heard about are supposed to wear this holy thread. Its supposed to be treated with great respect. There are procedures to ensure that the thread, for example, does not get offended when you take a pee break -- you get the idea. So in Bengal, in my dorm, I have seen them used to hang mosquito nets to tying leaky taps. Its just a f'ing piece of thread that someone's grandparent gets upset over if the person doesn't wear it, so the person wears it but treats it nothing more than just a thread that happened to be around.

Totally unrelated, I do hope that you start programming for the fun of it, just as much I hope that for myself.

According to a Sikh friend, in practice, Sikhs are still aware of caste- in fact, Sikhs from a high-caste background are more likely to keep their family's original surname and add Singh/Kaur as a middle name.

Its one of the most politically hot topics in India for a while now.

I don't know if their expectation turned out to be true, and obviously there are a lot of people who don't share their thinking, but I found it striking that they would even expect people feel differently based on where their daughter was living. In the U.S. we learn that caste rules are "religious," and our idea of religion is like Christianity, something that is either true everywhere or true nowhere. The idea that your judgmental neighbors would say "oh, it's fine because they're living in a country where nobody believes in that stuff" was a new one for me.

Upper-caste Indians basically see themselves as people on top of the racial hierarchy. In many ways they identify far more strongly with British or American elites than with Dalits.

It doesn't really have anything to do with the content of BLM's message, but everything to do with who is saying it, how they're saying it, and to whom.

The caste system in India sounds exactly like the class system in the US, only more formalized. In my area, there absolutely are surnames that you can associate with 'those' people, and who are, in my experience, passed over for jobs.

Maybe it's my ignorance, but doesn't a caste system whereby you are exposed to more privileges simply due to your birth sound exactly like a class system based on income whereby you are exposed to privilege simply because of your birth (because of your parents' income)?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=7m49DT8pPe0

Maybe in France, I don't know about that. But from what I've learned about the caste system, it's nothing like the class system in the US.

Sure, the US class system is (statistically speaking) heritable, but it doesn't follow you around for life, tied to your surname, determining who you can marry or what jobs you're allowed to get, or if you'll get beaten simply for walking into certain buildings or touching strangers.

US racism might be a more appropriate comparison.

One of the things I've learned is that if you don't use euphemisms to minimize the poverty that you came from, some people treat you differently when they understand what poverty actually means and what it meant for you. For that reason, I tend not to share, or be completely honest about it.

That said, I've had a tendency to spoil myself since I started making good money over a decade ago (top ~10% or so). I'm not rich, I don't have generational wealth, and I have a modest amount of debt. My daughter just turned 18yo, and is graduating HS in the spring. I'm doing what I can to help her make the best decisions for what she wants to do.

In the end, I kind of lucked out. I got into programming around the right time... managed to recover from a very hard year when the .com bubble burst in early 00's. Despite my parents being together my entire life, I haven't managed to do the same. I'm twice divorced, and currently engaged, and hesitant.

I've effectively had to start from roughly nothing three times in my life. I was kicked out as a young adult. After the .com bust, I had only what could fit in the back of my pickup, repo'd 3 months after 9/11. And after my second divorce, I didn't have much to speak of.

All told, I've been relatively fortunate, and determined through my life to keep pushing forward. I've managed to push through my personality disorder (similar to add/adhd). I've fought with pretty severe depression several times. I push through regular anxiety. Though I tend to push full burn until I burn out (getting close now).

I'm not so much complaining as stating that not everyone doing relatively well started off that well, or had the advantages that many will assume. And even then, you can walk out of a situation with pretty much nothing and still climb back out again. Right now, my heart goes out to everyone who is losing everything they have, watching it all fall apart. A lot of the top 10-50% will wind up in the bottom 50% when it's all said and done.

I will say that of the people from other cultures that I've worked with in my life, those from India tend to have more interesting interactions based on the caste they grew up in. The variance is far broader than most Americans, Russians or Chinese I've worked with. Though most of the Chinese I've worked with are also from a wealthy background typically. Russians who have come up pre vs post communism vary a lot though, mostly from their experience. But those are just my observations.

Okay, going to stop rambling now.

Does that include almost all Americans, regardless of race? Because compared to most of the rest of the world, we're obviously and measurably privileged wrt materials assets, regardless of race[1].

1. With respect to material assets. With respect to other assets (spiritual, social, etc), I would argue that we Americans are often in the lower tiers.

True, am not against that, but without checks and balances, as as happened in India, it ends up creating another set of problems ( poor Brahmins now complain of lack of opportunities).

The caste system was not as rigid before, it was more a system around professions ( Brahmins - intellectual class, the Kshatriyas - warriors, Vyshya - Merchants), until someone at the top decided it did not have to be based on that anymore.

I think it happens in a lot of circumstances, even if there isnt a name for it in the West.

I've, unfortunately, witnessed this as well in school and in the workplace.

> They simply (and sincerely) could not acknowledge why someone would phrase as a criticism something that for them is so naturally correct.

This, again unfortunately, is spot on. When called out on such discriminatory behavior, their attitude was that it was rude of the person who called the toxic behavior out to even point it out in the first place.

Anyways, back to the question of discrimination. I’d wager a bet that biases exist against dark skinned Indian people. India, as a society has had that baggage.

It’s like you said; proof is hard to establish at an individual level without a thorough investigation etc etc. But it’s to counter these biases that we have multiple rounds.

Much like the conversation around other forms of discrimination — gender, race etc —- the best thing to do is participate in the conversations around it. In the case of learning more about caste, I have been listening to material shared on Newlaundry podcasts, watching Kahaniaya Kumar’s speeches/interviews and reading/consuming material published by Stalin K (no relation to the Soviet politician), tweets/works from Kavitha Krishnan.

Disclaimer: I’m an upper caste Indian person on an H1B. I’d say that it’s no surprise to me that I’ve been a beneficiary of the caste system than otherwise.

I would really like hear from other folks with Indian background on their experiences around caste.

National origin discrimination involves treating people (applicants or employees) unfavorably because they are from a particular country or part of the world, because of ethnicity or accent, or because they appear to be of a certain ethnic background (even if they are not). National origin discrimination also can involve treating people unfavorably because they are married to (or associated with) a person of a certain national origin. Discrimination can occur when the victim and the person who inflicted the discrimination are the same national origin. “””

That’s the definition given by the EEOC. I wasn’t sure either, but reading that it leans me towards it being illegal. California is also currently suing Cisco, saying they allowed caste discrimination by a manager. AIUI their defense is that they investigated and were unable to corroborate those allegations, which they presumably wouldn’t do if they considered caste-based discrimination legal.

It's like all the education was only for earning $$ not expanding the mindset (realising your privilege, giving back and at the very least be nice to people agnostic of their race/gender/nationality etc).

But this is not what affirmative action is. The purpose of affirmative action is to help under-privileged people. If the help is going to privileged people instead, it's not affirmative action, it's corruption.

If it's really true, as you suggest, that some Dalit are rich and some Brahmin are poor, that some Dalit are privileged and some upper castes are not, then what does the caste system even mean? And why do people care enough that it's still a thing?

The affirmative action in India is to reduce this gap so that their representation is comparable to their population.

I disagree. I grew up poor and white, I was the "victim" of AA once, I come from exactly the demographic that racist demagogues play to, and I still disagree. Just as the original systemic discrimination has uneven effect (on both sides), so does AA. The beneficiaries of AA as it has existed in the US are not particularly likely to be privileged. In fact it really is a bit of the opposite, because it's much easier to skirt AA in professions requiring high levels of education and specialization. It mostly has its effect at the lower end of the economic spectrum, in jobs that even those who have been shortchanged by the educational system can do.

Do some rich minorities benefit from AA? Do some poor white people get the shaft as a result? Oh, I do know about that, and it sucks mightily. From what I can tell it's quite possible that India's reservation system is even worse. But that doesn't mean AA must fail. Flaws in a specific implementation of an idea do not necessarily refute the idea itself. The US version of AA, for all its many and great flaws, still seems net positive and a valid part of addressing systemic discrimination.

Honestly from the arguments I'm seeing in here, it really really isn't. From the perspective of a white guy with almost no understanding whatsoever of the caste system and its politics, I'm seeing exactly the same kinds of arguments here that I find being made by racists.

Affirmative action is not "always bad." There are multiple purposes of affirmative action, some of which have NOTHING to do with the individual student.

About 60% of NFL alumni in the US are of African-American origin, and that number climbs every year. Most coaches in the NFL are either former players or coaches at some other level of football. The VAAAAST majority of coaches at the NFL level at ALL levels are white. Of the 32 head coaching positions in the league, only 3 are held by black coaches, and black coaches are more likely to get fired quicker than their white counterparts.

You know why? Because the owners are white. People hire who they relate to, and a white guy is going to relate to another white guy more than they will to most black guys. It's simple.

Same thing applies to affirmative action. A lower caste person who gets a chance and succeeds is more likely to hire lower caste employees. So even though those lower caste employees may not have been direct beneficiaries of affirmative action, they can still benefit from the network effect.

There is no reason to identify as "upper caste" unless one is interested in maintaining that hierarchy.

But it looks like these measures do not solve where the systemic oppression exists. Systemic oppression exists mostly in wealth inequalities, and somewhat in society that restricts access to education for those who are oppressed. Given that is the problem, the solution should be to provide high quality universal primary and secondary education. Taking number of STEM engineers by race/caste and trying to force universities to discriminate in admissions does not solve the poor quality of public school education

You are interpreting the parent comment as a moral defense of caste discrimination. I guess it is, but I think it says something valid about the causal roots of the situation, which needs to be understood even assuming you think it's bad and needs to be changed. How can it be changed otherwise?

If certain castes are subject to affirmative action in India, and not elsewhere, then they are inevitably going to go where things are relatively easier.

The justice of that affirmative action doesn't change the incentives. Anywhere you try to squeeze people, they will respond, creating a new "problem". What is the ultimate solution going to be?

I don't believe in free markets uber alles but I do believe in regulatory failure.

Talking about people "digging in their heels" makes for a picture of a world where everyone would "just be reasonable" that's tantalizingly close to reality.

But people are never going to just give up on choosing the best available opportunity they have, at least on average.

In India, caste doesn't really map well to wealth.

In this case, are there some people that "don't deserve it"? Certainly, but there's probably many more that do who are making use of the program. Adding overhead and bureaucracy to try to weed out the undeserving may very well make it so fewer people who need the assistance get it. It's human nature to overweight small negative outcomes while underweighting the larger good. You need to objectively study the problem to fully understand where the tipping point is which rarely happens because these types of things quickly become political.

I don't personally know enough about this particular topic to speak to it, but the general answer to the question

  > How hard is it to disqualify them due to financial means?

Ironically, it is breaking down in India because of female infanticide creating a skewed gender distribution (around 1.14:1, when the natural distribution is 1.05:1), and men having no choice but to look outside their caste if they want to marry.

I doubt if the average English person today is really even consciously aware of the Anglo-Normans being higher class. Certainly there's no easily visible divide or overt discrimination in modern times. Yet the legacy of the caste system left by William the Conqueror continues to shape society a thousand years later.

[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/842...

That's a very broad brush you are painting with! Some parts of the country have made significant progress. See for example work done by Narayana Guru, a social reformer in the 1800s, and its impact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narayana_Guru#Fight_against_ca...

You can find one study here https://www.epw.in/engage/article/Survey-at-an-IIT-Campus-Sh....

General category has a higher percentage of attended govt school and less private school than SC/ST. Interesting to see that is not true for OBC.

No. Only my observation from when I went to IIT for my undergrad about 2 decades ago. At that time they even used to have remedial classes for students who came in through the reservation system. Again, I would like to emphasize that not all of those students were having difficulties coping with the workload. In fact, it is not uncommon for the general category students to crumble under pressure as well.

> Then it is not a stretch to imagine that some of them may not be very good at their job either.

It's not right to assume that someone may not be good at their current job because they may (in your mind) have benefited from some "affirmative action" program far in the past (John Doe is 20+ years into his career). Judge people on current performance, not past history. Plenty of average students shine in the real world.

Yes, plenty of average students shine in the real world. Nothing you say here contradicts what I wrote above. To rephrase with an example, if GPA was the only criteria for accepting students into a university, and in a class of mostly 4.0 students you admit a few 2.0 students with affirmative action, it is not difficult to see how they would have trouble in class. If they also get demotivated and end up not getting much from that education, some of them may not do so well in work life either.* > The cynic in me thinks this guy accuser in the lawsuit is trying to hide his incompetence

Why don't we let the courts work it out instead of speculating on people's motivations or honesty?

Agreed. That was uncalled for. But I did preface it with "cynic in me".

I think the only way to really have affirmative action is to give extra high qualoty training to the group you want to help starting 2 years before the entrance examination. (and no extra points then)

>I became painfully aware of this problem more than 40 years ago, when I was teaching at Cornell University and discovered that half the black students there were on some form of academic probation.

>These students were not stupid or uneducable. On the contrary, the average black student at Cornell at that time scored at the 75th percentile on scholastic tests. Their academic qualifications were better than those of three-quarters of all American students who took those tests.

>The average white student would have been wiped out at Cornell. But the average white student was unlikely to be admitted to Cornell, in the first place. Nor was a white student who scored at the 75th percentile.

>That was a “favor” reserved for black students. This favor turned black students who would have been successful at most American colleges and universities into failures at Cornell.

>None of this was peculiar to Cornell. Black students who scored at the 90th percentile in math had serious academic problems trying to keep up at M.I.T., where other students scored somewhere within the top 99th percentile.

>There were other fine engineering schools around the country where those same students could have learned more, when taught at a normal pace, rather than at a breakneck speed geared to students with extremely rare abilities in math.

It changes the picture completely. That makes the upper castes 30 times more likely to be in tech than any other Indian, and who knows the ratio when only Dalits are considered, I guess more than 100.

The Cagots are particularly weird, as nobody knows why they were treated like that.

The only difference is that a person's 'caste' in India, is dictated by blood and can never be changed. Whereas in the West, a person can theoretically transition from one class to another.

Dunno about all of that ... I myself am not sufficently race obsessed I guess. What I meant was that in most cases people get ahead for reasons that have little to nothing to do with merit, and in my experience also that have little to nothing to do with race.

Maybe if you find yourself constantly surrounded by racists you should evaluate how your choices contribute to this. I don't have this experience.

And I'm pretty sure there would be some legal implications for what you claim, so if you are aware of this and not reporting it I'm pretty sure you face potential legal liabilities.

I think it is pretty disgusting that people just look the other way while they witness racism. If I ever saw anything at my place of work that would suggest any racism in hiring choices the person would not make it to the end of the day.

There are mechanisms (and we can discuss their effectiveness) that try to balance the playing field in provision of opportunity - but there's a huge gap in "provision to cope with failure"

e.g. Two people graduate with equal abilities and are offered an opportunity to found a start-up. One of those people knows his parents can cover rent/food if things don't go to plan, and the other will be homeless (or maybe more likely would have accumulate personal debt, or leave the city and move back to parents). One of those people is more likely to be able to take that risk and therefore more likely to reap a reward.

I'm not even sure I can think of a fair way to level this.

Yes. But those indians in favor of the caste system remain "backward" - it's not just something like poverty keeping the lower castes back and the rich getting an extra advantage over others to have their kids be rich.

It adds a further layer of pure discrimination akin to very heavy racism.

Imagine the poor considered not only poor, but inferior human beings -- and not allowed (or accepted by "civilized" upper caste people, when legal) to do many things even if they have the money to do them.

I remember when I saw this for the first time and it left me speechless. I'd work with a team of Indians, all officially with the same job title and qualifications. But while most of the guys (this was a long time ago, it was all guys) would really work hard, there would always be one who knew nothing about the job and didn't even bother to pretend he's working. He would literally just walk around acting like the CEO on inspection, or even like a slave owner, wearing a suit that cost as much as the yearly salary of the other guys. He was of course paid a lot more then the rest of the team even if he couldn't find his way out of a wet paper bag.

But what shocked me the most was that the rest of the guys, even when they knew I'm (very publicly) on their side, still talked as if this is the natural order of things. It was not only normal, it was expected. I realized that it's not like a prisoner obeying the guards because they have guns, it's like someone obeying a priest because "he talks to God".

Those colleagues accepted that their position is immutable, that those things were happening exactly the way they were supposed to happen. The "natural order of things". Maybe things changed in recent times, I certainly hope nobody accepts their position just because someone wants an easier time discriminating them.

Perhaps because you know those two things are linked?

Because it's absolutely toxic for society as a whole if inequality gets amplified over generations.

Estate tax should ideally be 100% above a reasonable cap. And by "reasonable" I mean a sum definitely below "never needs to work to support a middle class lifestyle".

> If the first generation achieved success, should it be reset in the next one?

Yes, absolutely.

> Why?

Because many opportunities are essentially zero-sum.

I post this not really as a rebuttal to your post, or the grandparent, but more of a "here's what success a couple of generations later" actually looks like and what some of its characteristics may be.

Luck is important too. I read an article about a widow in India being giving a loan for a tractor. 2 months payments on the loan have to amount to about a year of her previous income (note that the other 10 months need to be repaid - this is a loan not a gift). A tractor is such a force multiplier that she is able to make the payments all year and save up enough to dream of sending her son to a good school. This whole thing depends on someone being willing to risk giving someone a loan who clearly doesn't make enough to pay it off.

I also should have been clearer: racism is definately also a factor. Poor minorities fare so badly because they get both racism AND classism (or whatever the appropriate term is for the natural increase of both wealth and poverty).

I think one of the major upsides of the cold war was that western countries were very eager to show we could do better than those dirty commies. That birthed all sorts of programs to give people a chance of improving their lots. Most of those are dead now.

That's totally irrelevant though. People are not saying it's impossible for poor to start a company and make it big (in which case those would be counter-examples), they say it's many times harder.

The discrimination lies in the extra difficulty. As someone said, the rich kids starting a startup get to play startup in "easy mode" (which also doesn't mean they'll succeed easily in the market -- just that devoting time to and trying to succeed is far more easy and less rick prone for them).

The caste system is about natural born status not tied to economics, but ancestral in nature. You're born into your caste and there isn't mobility within the system. So, try as you might, if you're in the lower caste you're in the lower caste and people higher up are going to treat you that way regardless.

I'm not overly familiar with it myself, but I understand it's a deeply ingrained cultural thing that sounds damaging beyond belief and incredibly bad idea, yet somehow inescapable.

The difference between a news report and an editorial piece is easy to see once you know the difference.

A news report sticks to the facts - who, what, when, where - with little or no commentary. It usually has a summary with all the important points in the first paragraph. A sentence such as "Then, in a tragic double-whammy," or "...you can be assured..." is not appropriate in a news story. See for example https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cisco-lawsuit/california-..., a news article about the same case.

The quality of the writing in the article being discussed is also quite poor, with mixed metaphors ("cradle of caste people are disgorged from."), awkward turns of phrase ("serial scale") and even grammatical errors "Their woman and children are".

Hinduism and its caste system seem alien to most western people, but the "you should know your place, peasant" - argument is pretty similar in some interpretations in Abrahamic religions. But sure, some cultures have their own peculiarities and I think not being apart of religious communities is still very rare in India.

If they believed that, it would also explain the other things like lack of opportunities and low wages too.