Critically assess the forms in which untouchability continues to be practised. (2010)
Assessing continuity requires periodisation rather than a list. Since Article 17, untouchability has not simply survived or simply declined: it has retreated in the domains where enforcement became costly, persisted where it is tied to land and labour, and reappeared in institutions the Constitution itself created. B. R. Ambedkar‘s warning that political equality would sit atop social inequality is the frame for that uneven record.
The arc since abolition
| Period | Characteristic form | What moved |
|---|---|---|
| 1950s–60s | Open denial of water, roads, temples | Article 17, the Protection of Civil Rights Act (1955) and temple-entry laws; village practice largely untouched |
| 1970s–80s | Collective punishment of assertion | Dalit Panthers (1972) and Dalit electoral politics; atrocities law enacted in 1989 |
| 1990s–2000s | Commensal forms retreat in towns | Migration, schooling and reservation-led mobility; exclusion migrates into housing and hiring |
| 2010s onward | Institutional, professional, digital | Campus exclusion argued as merit, rental refusal, online caste abuse; the State responds by legislating and by counting |
What has genuinely retreated
Public, ceremonial untouchability has weakened. Temple entry, access to roads and schools, and the open refusal of service are harder to enforce where populations are mobile and anonymous; M. N. Srinivas‘s observation that secular mobility follows material gain has been borne out as Dalit households entering non-agricultural work escape the sanctions a village could impose. Urban residence and education both measurably reduce reported practice.
What has persisted
- Occupational untouchability is the least changed. The Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act (2013) outlawed the work and its hereditary basis, yet hazardous sewer and septic-tank cleaning continues to be done almost entirely by the same castes, which is the clearest evidence that prohibition without alternative livelihood fails.
- Marriage remains the hard core. Endogamy is still enforced by boycott, khap intervention and honour killing, and inter-caste unions remain a small minority of marriages.
- Residential separation survives translation into the city as refusal of tenancy and clustered settlement.
What is new, and what it reveals
Exclusion now travels through formally impersonal institutions — evaluation, recruitment, peer networks, online anonymity — where intent is deniable. That the law itself remains contested is telling: Parliament’s 2018 amendment to the atrocities law, restoring safeguards diluted by judicial interpretation and upheld by the Supreme Court in 2020, shows untouchability’s legal frontier still moving. So does the return of official counting: Telangana’s caste survey, released in February 2025, enumerated caste-wise social and economic conditions for nearly all households, an admission that the State cannot govern inequality it refuses to measure.
Conclusion
The honest assessment is neither persistence nor disappearance but displacement with graded retreat: weakest where the practice needed a public audience, strongest where it is fused to sanitation work and marriage. Untouchability today is less a rule about touch than a regime of stigma, which is why it survives every law written against its older form.