How do caste and class come together in creating the category of extreme poor? (2014)
The extreme poor are not simply the lowest income decile; they are a socially manufactured category in which economic dispossession and ritual stigma compound one another. B. R. Ambedkar, in Annihilation of Caste (1936), caught the mechanism when he described caste as a division of labourers rather than a division of labour — the worker, not the work, is graded.
Caste allocates assets, class reproduces the allocation
- The caste order denied property and learning to the “impure” castes and tied them to polluting tasks. The inheritance is assetlessness — entry into the market with nothing but labour power.
- The Socio-Economic and Caste Census 2011 found that close to 30 per cent of rural households were landless and drew the major part of their income from manual casual labour — precisely the stratum in which Scheduled Castes are over-represented.
- Without land or capital there is no buffer against illness or a failed crop, so distress borrowing and debt bondage follow. Class position is thus received through caste and reproduced by the market.
Stigmatised work and cumulative deprivation
- Sukhadeo Thorat, with Katherine S. Newman in Blocked by Caste (2010), showed that exclusion is not confined to the ritual sphere. It operates in labour, credit, land and housing markets, so low caste rank independently depresses earnings and raises poverty risk.
- Caste-marked occupations outlive the statutes that ban them: under the Union government’s sanitation workers’ scheme, more than 88,000 sewer and septic-tank workers had been profiled across urban local bodies by September 2025, hazardous work still drawn from a narrow set of castes.
- André Béteille‘s Caste, Class and Power (1965) recorded its spatial form in Sripuram, where the Adi-Dravida cheri stood apart at the village edge: segregation converts ritual distance into unequal access to water, schooling and work.
Why this is intersection, not addition
- Class poverty is in principle reversible by income; caste deprivation is not, because it works through humiliation, refused credit and closed networks. Amartya Sen‘s capability approach names the loss precisely — caste attacks the conversion of income into functionings.
- Gender is the third axis. Uma Chakravarti‘s account of Brahmanical patriarchy places the Dalit woman agricultural labourer where all three hierarchies meet, making her the archetypal extreme poor.
- The category is not co-terminous with caste. A small Scheduled Caste professional class has emerged, while poor Muslims, particularly vulnerable tribal groups and circular migrants occupy the same stratum without sharing its ritual stigma.
Conclusion
The extreme poor emerge where a stigmatised ritual identity meets assetlessness, each deprivation sealing the exit from the other. Policy that reads them as merely poor — transfers without land, dignity or protection from atrocity — leaves the generating mechanism untouched.