Write some of the important social reforms in India for the removal of untouchability. (2014)
Reform against untouchability has come from three directions — from within Hinduism, from the excluded themselves, and from the state. They differ over who is the agent of change, which explains their uneven success.
Reform from within the tradition
- Rammohan Roy‘s Brahmo Samaj (1828) and Dayanand Saraswati‘s Arya Samaj (1875), with its shuddhi rite, attacked birth-based exclusion by appeal to a purer scriptural past.
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi made removal of untouchability part of the Congress constructive programme, founded the Harijan Sevak Sangh (1932) and backed temple-entry satyagrahas — Vaikom (1924–25) and Guruvayur — culminating in the Travancore Temple Entry Proclamation of 1936.
- The method is persuasion: a change of heart among caste Hindus, with untouchables as beneficiaries.
Reform from below
- Jyotirao Phule and Savitribai Phule: a school for Shudra and Ati-Shudra girls (1848), the Satyashodhak Samaj (1873) and Gulamgiri (1873), which read caste as slavery.
- Sree Narayana Guru‘s Aruvippuram consecration (1888) and the SNDP Yogam (1903) among the Ezhavas; Ayyankali‘s Sadhu Jana Paripalana Sangham (1907), which won school entry in Travancore.
- Periyar E. V. Ramasamy‘s Self-Respect Movement (1925), which rejected Brahmanical ritual, and Ad-Dharm in Punjab (1926).
- B. R. Ambedkar‘s Bahishkrit Hitakarini Sabha (1924), the Mahad Satyagraha (1927) for tank water, the Kalaram temple entry attempt (1930), and Annihilation of Caste (1936). Here the excluded are the agents, and the demand is right, not grace.
Constitutional and legal reform
- Article 17 abolishes untouchability and forbids its practice in any form; Article 15(2) opens wells, tanks and public places; Article 25(2)(b) authorises throwing Hindu temples open to all classes.
- The Untouchability (Offences) Act, 1955, strengthened and renamed the Protection of Civil Rights Act in 1976; the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, whose diluted provisions were restored by the 2018 amendment.
- The Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act, 2013, replacing the 1993 statute, with the NAMASTE scheme now profiling and mechanising sanitation work.
An assessment
Law has worked best where a movement carried it, and stalled where enforcement depends on the very local elites who benefit. The evidence is occupational: among sewer and septic-tank workers profiled under the current sanitation scheme, roughly two-thirds are Scheduled Castes, and the Union government reported 47 deaths in such cleaning during 2025. Ritual exclusion has migrated rather than ended — to the rental market, the campus and the language of merit.
Conclusion
Reform from within softened untouchability, reform from below delegitimised it, and constitutional reform criminalised it. What none has yet achieved is Ambedkar’s own condition: destroying the graded order that keeps producing an impure pole to define the pure against.