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GS Paper: GS1-10.Social empowerment, communalism, regionalism & secularism.

  • State govts. stumped by demography committee’s ‘religion-wise’ inquiries

    Why in the News

    A Union panel on illegal immigration is seeking religion-wise data from routine administrative records, most of which States say they do not keep by religion. The Home Ministry’s High-Level Committee on Demographic Changes (HLCDC) has sent States 35 questions on records such as school enrolment and property transactions, and States say they cannot answer most of them.

    What is the HLCDC, and what has it asked for?

    1. What it is: A Home Ministry panel led by retired Supreme Court judge Justice Prakash Prabhakar Naolekar, constituted on 26 May.
    2. Mandate: It studies demographic changes caused by illegal immigration and “other abnormal reasons”, and suggests measures to deal with them.
    3. Religion-wise records: It wants 15 years of religion-wise data on birth and vehicle registrations, school enrolment and property transactions. This is like asking every government counter to sort its files by faith.
    4. Six communities: Every category is to be broken down for Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, Muslims, Parsis and Buddhists.
    5. The takeaway: A panel on illegal immigration is seeking a faith-wise map of everyday administration, widening its inquiry from who entered illegally to how every community lives.

    What else does the questionnaire seek?

    1. Identity document spikes: The panel asks which districts saw unusual increases in Aadhaar, voter ID and ration card registrations.
    2. Enrolment anomalies: It asks which districts show school enrolment trends that do not match past birth rates, and why.
    3. Religious structures: It seeks temples, mosques, churches and other structures built in the period, and any Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping, meaning digital maps, used to identify them.
    4. Conversions and detention: It seeks intelligence and commission reports on religious conversions among Scheduled Tribes (STs). It also asks about operational detention centres and undocumented migrants apprehended or deported.

    Why can States not answer, and why is religion-wise data contested?

    1. Records not kept by religion: States hold only two relevant records: birth registrations, whose certificates name the newborn’s religion, and counts of migrants apprehended or deported.
    2. Secular construct: State officials hold that the secular construct of the Constitution prohibits collecting data under religious categories. The panel has received no State reply yet.
    3. Sachar precedent: The Congress-led government set up the Sachar Committee in 2005 to study Muslims’ status. In 2006 the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), then the principal Opposition, called its recommendations a religious quota and socially divisive.

    How does the Bihar SIR feed into the panel’s work?

    1. SIR ruling: On 27 May the Supreme Court upheld Bihar’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR), a fresh check of the electoral roll. It held that the Election Commission of India (EC) may check citizenship only to decide who stays on the roll.
    2. Reference to the Centre: The Court gave the EC four weeks to send the Centre the names of electors on the 2003 roll removed as non-citizens. A competent authority will then decide their citizenship under the Citizenship Act, 1955.
    3. Data pending: The EC has not yet given the panel data on those excluded as suspected foreign nationals, and has not explained the delay.

    Challenges

    1. Constitutional exposure: Religion-wise mapping of property and enrolment invites challenge under Articles 14 and 15, which bar discrimination on religion.
    2. Inference by proxy: Where records lack religion, officials may guess it from names, yielding unreliable and stigmatising data.
    3. Conflating religion with illegality: Reading religion-wise growth as illegal immigration turns a demographic trend into a finding without adjudication.

    Way Forward

    1. Lawful statistical sources: Use the Census and the National Family Health Survey, which record religion under legal safeguards.
    2. Narrower questionnaire: Limit requests to records that exist, such as migrants apprehended or deported.
    3. Published method: The Home Ministry should publish the panel’s terms of reference and methodology.

    Conclusion

    With States citing both missing records and the Constitution, the panel’s inquiry has stalled on data. Whether it narrows its demand to census data and adjudicated citizenship cases will decide if its findings hold up.

    Back2Basics: Secularism in the Indian Constitution

    1. Preamble: “Secular” was added by the Constitution (Forty-second Amendment) Act, 1976.
    2. Articles 25 to 28: Guarantee freedom of conscience and religion and freedom to manage religious affairs. They also bar taxes that promote a religion and religious instruction in State institutions.
    3. Basic structure: S.R. Bommai v. Union of India (1994), a nine judge Bench, held secularism part of the basic structure.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “[2022, GS1, 15 marks] Are tolerance, assimilation and pluralism the key elements in the making of an Indian form of secularism? Justify your answer.”

  • Don’t make learning a test of worth

    Why in the News

    A student at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay has taken his life, and the circumstances of the death are under investigation. Accounts of what happened are sharply polarised, so establishing the immediate cause will not answer the larger questions the death raises. Over the last decade the IITs have recorded more than 170 deaths by suicide, a large number of them by students from Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe communities. A Supreme Court appointed task force on student suicides already has an interim report on the table. The contested point is whether such deaths are individual mental health events or the outcome of how these institutions treat the students they admit.

    Why does admission not deliver equality on campus?

    1. Society reproduced on campus: Prestigious institutions are not immune to the strains, power structures, hierarchies and discriminatory practices of society at large. Selectivity does not filter any of those out.
    2. The pressure to excel becomes outsized: Students arrive from very different social backgrounds into a system where the pressure to excel acquires outsized importance. Admission does not by itself guarantee equality for a student from a marginalised community.
    3. The additional burden: The burden is greater where a student must also negotiate subtle prejudice. A persistent sense of not quite belonging sits on top of the ordinary academic load.

    What did the Supreme Court appointed task force find?

    1. The panel and the report: A task force on student suicides appointed by the Supreme Court and chaired by a retired Supreme Court judge issued an interim report in June. Its findings are about the institutions rather than about the students.
    2. Complaint mechanisms do not work: Students often see institutional complaint mechanisms as difficult to access, ineffective, or operating in tokenistic ways. A mechanism that goes unused produces no record of the problem it exists to capture.
    3. Under reporting by the students most affected: For students from marginalised communities the fear of not being believed, or of retaliation, makes them hesitant to report discrimination at all. An absence of complaints is therefore not evidence that discrimination is absent.

    Why is the mental health framing insufficient?

    1. Counselling and wellness provision: More counsellors, helplines, wellness centres and greater awareness of distress are all necessary. None of them examines the conditions that produced the distress.
    2. The institution’s absence from the account: Individualising suicidal tendencies as personal difficulty, or as a student’s failure to cope, removes the institution from the account. It is then never required to ask difficult questions of itself.

    Why does faculty composition matter beyond representation?

    1. The social mismatch: The panel described a social mismatch between the backgrounds of a large number of students and those of their teachers. Access to higher education has grown more diverse and faculty composition has not followed.
    2. The measured gap: More than 65 per cent of faculty in IITs, National Institutes of Technology (NIT) and private institutions are from communities other than the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes and the Other Backward Classes (OBC).
    3. Understanding from within: A more diverse faculty helps a campus understand social difference from within. Support then rests on institutional culture rather than on the good intentions of individual teachers.

    What does making academic performance the measure of worth cost?

    1. The promise of social mobility: In a country with a large aspirational class, the promise of social mobility is an important part of pursuing a degree. Education cannot be separated from career ambition.
    2. The purpose of an institution of learning: At the heart of academic life sits the process of gaining knowledge rather than grades, degrees and the job market alone. The purpose of an institution is to intertwine the two.
    3. The cost of an unrelenting measure: A student thinking constantly about grades, rankings, deadlines, evaluations and the consequences of falling behind has little room to follow an idea. The pleasure of learning is displaced by the accounting of it.
    4. Artificial intelligence as a shortcut: The ease with which artificial intelligence (AI) becomes a shortcut to learning makes the question unavoidable. An institution has to state whether it rewards the acquisition of knowledge or the ability to produce the right answer under pressure.

    What would an institution that examined itself have to change?

    1. The question the system has not answered: Institutions have not examined whether all students have the same space to enjoy friendships, freedom and intellectual discovery. Those are part of what higher education promises and they are not evenly distributed.
    2. The variable an institution actually controls: Elite institutions cannot insulate students from the vagaries of the economy. They can decide whether those uncertainties are amplified on campus, or whether education supplies the intellectual confidence to confront them.

    Conclusion

    The difficulty is not that the cause of each death is unknown. It is that both routes by which a student could raise a grievance, the complaint mechanism and the teacher, have been found wanting by an inquiry the institutions did not themselves commission. The unresolved question is whether an institution will accept an external finding against itself, since nothing in the present response obliges it to. The marker to watch is whether the task force’s final report attaches a named accountability route to the grievance mechanism, or repeats the recommendation to strengthen counselling.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “[2024, GS1, 15 marks] Despite comprehensive policies for equity and social justice, underprivileged sections are not yet getting the full benefits of affirmative action envisaged by the Constitution. Comment.”

  • The murder of a musician, and a familiar unease

    Why in the News

    A guitarist from Manipur who had spent close to twenty years working and teaching in Delhi died after being assaulted by a group of people in his building, with the immediate dispute recorded by the police as one over noise. The death follows the 2014 killing of an Arunachal Pradesh student in Lajpat Nagar, which drew national attention to violence against people from the Northeast and led the Delhi Police to set up the Special Police Unit for the North East Region (SPUNER), a dedicated unit with helplines and nodal officers for complaints from Northeastern residents. More than a decade after that unit was created, an investigation this year found that one in four Police Control Room (PCR) calls from Northeastern residents was linked to landlord harassment. The tension is that a remedy built around policing violent incidents has left untouched the everyday transactions, tenancy above all, in which the vulnerability actually shows up.

    What does the record of the past decade show?

    1. The 2014 case set the institutional response: An Arunachal Pradesh student was killed in Delhi in 2014 after an altercation with shopkeepers in Lajpat Nagar, and the Delhi Police subsequently created SPUNER, with other measures opening avenues to seek help.
    2. The exposure has relocated rather than closed: An investigation this year found that one in four PCR calls received from Northeastern residents was linked to landlord harassment.
    3. The pattern extends past Delhi: A 24 year old student from Tripura died in Dehradun last December after being attacked.
    4. Motive itself is contested in the record: In that case the victim’s brother alleged that racial slurs preceded the assault, and the police said their preliminary investigation found no evidence of a racial motive and described the incident as a confrontation that escalated in the heat of the moment.

    Why has the existing remedy not closed the gap?

    1. A unit built for incidents does not reach a relationship: SPUNER responds to a complaint after an act. Tenancy harassment is continuous, deniable and rarely produces a single reportable offence. Eg. The concentration of PCR calls in landlord disputes is the measure of that gap.
    2. Establishing motive is left to the investigating officer: Whether an assault was racially motivated is a finding recorded during investigation, and a finding of no racial motive closes the question without an independent test.
    3. Availability is not the same as use: Avenues to seek help were created after 2014, and the sense of vulnerability has not disappeared from everyday life more than a decade later.

    Does length of residence settle the question of belonging?

    1. The record of residence was long: The musician moved to Delhi nearly two decades ago, spent around 17 years working and teaching in the capital, established a music school, mentored students from home and taught at the Delhi School of Music.
    2. The life was locally rooted: By the time of his death he had built a profession, made friends, raised a family, and walked the same streets for years, while continuing to teach the music he had begun playing in Manipur.
    3. The question the death leaves open: How many years a person has to live in a city before he is simply of that place, rather than someone from somewhere else, is a difficult irony for people from one part of India negotiating safety, recognition and belonging in its capital.
    4. A single night displaces the preceding life: The account of such a death reduces easily to the noise outside the home, the argument, the blows in the stairwell and the journey to hospital, and drops the two decades that came before them.

    Challenges to the Special Police Unit for the North East Region

    1. Its jurisdiction is one city: The unit is a Delhi Police creation, so a resident of any other city has no equivalent point of contact. Eg. The Dehradun death last December fell outside any comparable unit’s remit.
      The Fix: Require every State police force with a significant Northeastern student and worker population to designate a nodal officer with the same published helpline and reporting duty.
    2. It has no remit over housing: Landlord harassment is a civil tenancy matter until it becomes an offence, so the single largest reported grievance sits outside the unit’s powers. Eg. One in four PCR calls from Northeastern residents concerns exactly this.
      The Fix: Bring refusal to let or eviction on grounds of region or ethnicity within a rent authority’s jurisdiction, with a penalty attached to a proved refusal.
    3. Racial motive is not an aggravating factor in law: Where a statute does not treat racial motivation as aggravating, an investigating officer recording no such motive changes neither the charge nor the sentence. Eg. The Dehradun case was closed on the record as an escalation rather than a racially motivated attack.
      The Fix: Insert racial or ethnic motivation as a statutory aggravating circumstance at sentencing, so the finding carries a consequence and is therefore investigated.
    4. Reporting depends on the complainant’s confidence: A unit reached only by a call from the person affected undercounts precisely those most reluctant to approach the police. Eg. Students and short term migrant workers dependent on a landlord for accommodation carry a direct cost for complaining.
      The Fix: Route complaints through college and university grievance cells with a mandatory onward referral, so the first contact is not the police station.

    Conclusion

    The institutional answer built after that killing was designed for the kind of event that produced it, a violent incident with an identifiable offender and a police response. What the intervening decade has documented is a different and more ordinary exposure, concentrated in housing, where no criminal complaint is filed and no unit has jurisdiction. Until refusal and harassment on grounds of ethnicity carry a defined legal consequence, the record will keep registering the incidents and missing the condition. The measurable thing to watch is whether the PCR call category that is already being counted is ever converted into a reportable enforcement statistic.

    Discrimination against Northeastern Indians in the cities

    1. What the term covers: It refers to differential treatment of people from the eight Northeastern States in housing, employment, education and public spaces in metropolitan India, resting on appearance, language and food practices rather than on caste.
    2. The population it affects: Large student and working populations from the region live in Delhi, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Pune, most of them outside the State in which their community holds Scheduled Tribe status.
    3. The legal position of that status: Scheduled Tribe status is notified State by State, so a person from a Northeastern Scheduled Tribe usually does not hold that status in the city they migrate to, and the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 therefore does not apply to them there.
    4. The institutional response so far: It has been organised around policing and helplines rather than around anti discrimination law.

    Laws and Rules Governing Racial and Ethnic Discrimination

    1. Constitution of India, Article 15: It prohibits discrimination by the State on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth, and Article 19(1)(e) protects the right to reside and settle in any part of India.
    2. Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023: It penalises promoting enmity between groups on grounds of race, language, place of birth or residence, and it does not recognise racist motivation as an aggravating circumstance in an offence against the person.
    3. Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989: It provides enhanced penalties and special courts for offences against Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, and its protection follows the State specific notification of that status.
    4. The Bezbaruah Committee, 2014: Set up by the Ministry of Home Affairs after the Lajpat Nagar killing, it recommended a dedicated penal provision against racial discrimination and fast track courts for such cases, and the penal provision has not been enacted.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “[2026, GS1, 10.0 marks] Unity in diversity remains the defining feature of Indian society despite the challenges from communalism and regionalism. Comment.”

  • Civil Service candidates await Centre’s word on foundation course amid case in top court

    Why in the News

    The Centre has asked the Supreme Court for permission to let the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) allocate services to the 2025 Civil Services Examination recommendees without implementing the Rohith Nathan judgment. That judgment, delivered on 11 March, found that the DoPT was excluding certain Other Backward Classes (OBC) candidates from reservation by treating them as creamy layer on the basis of their parents’ salary income alone. The Court directed corrective measures within six months. The examination results had been declared on 6 March, days before the ruling, which places one entire recruitment cycle across the line the judgment drew. The 958 candidates recommended in that cycle now have no service allocation and no foundation course date.

    What is the creamy layer income test?

    1. Where it comes from: The DoPT Office Memorandum of 8 September 1993 operationalised the Supreme Court’s direction in Indra Sawhney (1992) to exclude the socially advanced sections within a backward class.
    2. How it is structured: The Memorandum sets out a Schedule of six categories. The first five exclude a candidate by the status of the parent regardless of income, covering constitutional posts, service grades, armed forces ranks, professions and trade, and property ownership.
    3. The sixth category is residual: It applies an income and wealth test to everyone the first five do not catch, using gross annual family income above the ceiling for three consecutive years.
    4. What the income test leaves out: Salary income and agricultural income are excluded from that calculation. Only income from property, business, capital gains and similar sources is counted, and the ceiling has stood at Rs 8 lakh since 2017.

    What did the Rohith Nathan judgment find, and what did it direct?

    1. The finding: A Division Bench held that the DoPT was treating equals unequally, since the single variable separating two otherwise identical candidates was the parent’s employer.
    2. How the discrimination worked: A child of a government clerk was tested without salary income and passed. A child of a public sector or private employee on the same pay was tested with salary income counted and failed.
    3. What the Court held on the test itself: The income and wealth component is a residual filter, not the primary basis for exclusion. It must apply the same way to all until the government establishes equivalence between public sector posts and government grades.
    4. The direction: The Centre was to create supernumerary posts for the petitioners within six months, with services allotted according to the candidates’ ranks in their respective examination years.

    Why is the service allocation stalled?

    1. The Centre has asked to be excused from the ruling for this cycle: Its application seeks permission for the DoPT to allocate services without implementing the judgment.
    2. The cycle straddles the ruling: Results were declared on 6 March and the judgment came on 11 March, so allocation for this batch would be the first application of whichever reading the Court settles on.
    3. Nothing moves until the hearing: The Supreme Court is set to hear the Centre on 17 September, and the allocation question is what that hearing turns on.

    What are the 958 recommendees facing?

    1. The course has not begun: The foundation course was expected to begin in August and has not started.
    2. The schedule lapsed without a replacement: A tentative start date of 24 August was circulated, and nothing has been communicated since the matter came before the Court.
    3. No communication has reached the candidates: Recommended candidates report receiving nothing from the DoPT or from the academy about when the course will start.
    4. Neither official channel has been updated: No updates on the next steps have appeared on the DoPT website or on the website of the training academy.

    Challenges to the creamy layer determination

    1. The equivalence of posts was never established: The 1993 Schedule made the rank test for public sector and private employees conditional on an equivalence with government grades that has not been drawn up in three decades. Eg. Reservation policy is the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment’s subject under the Allocation of Business Rules, and the DoPT can only issue instructions once that Ministry frames the policy.
      The Fix: Notify a post-equivalence table so the rank-based categories apply uniformly whoever the employer is, which removes the need for the income test in these cases altogether.
    2. The income ceiling moves by discretion rather than by indexation: With no formula, the threshold stays static through years of inflation and then jumps, so the excluded population changes for reasons unrelated to backwardness. Eg. The ceiling went from Rs 1 lakh to Rs 8 lakh in five irregular steps over 24 years.
      The Fix: Tie the ceiling to a published price or wage index with automatic annual revision.
    3. Verification rests on self-declaration: Certificates are issued on a declaration checked by local revenue staff, so a defect surfaces only when the appointment is scrutinised. Eg. Recruitment bodies cancel candidatures years after selection over defective certificates.
      The Fix: Validate income declarations against tax and land records at the point the certificate is issued rather than at the point of appointment.
    4. No data exists on who actually captures the benefit: Without caste-wise data on selections and appointments, the claim that a small number of families corner reserved posts cannot be tested either way. Eg. The Rohini Commission on sub-categorisation of Other Backward Classes worked without a comprehensive survey of selections.
      The Fix: Publish caste-wise selection and appointment data against reserved posts as a standing annual return.
    5. Central and State lists diverge: A community recognised as backward by a State is often absent from the Central list, and the same test is administered differently across the two. Eg. Candidates holding State OBC certificates have been denied central reservation.
      The Fix: Publish a mapped concordance between the Central list and each State list, so a candidate can see which list governs a given post.

    Conclusion

    The dispute is no longer about whether the exclusion was wrong, since that has been decided. It is about who absorbs the cost of correcting it, and both available answers create a fresh set of claimants. A recruitment cycle cannot be held open indefinitely, and a batch allotted on a reading the Court has already rejected moves the litigation one year forward rather than ending it. The hearing later this month is where that choice is made, and the marker is whether the Court permits an interim allotment or holds the executive to the timetable it set.

    Back2Basics

    1. What it is: The Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration is the central training institution for the Indian Administrative Service.
    2. Where it is: It is located at Mussoorie in Uttarakhand.
    3. What the foundation course is: The Academy runs the common Foundation Course taken by fresh recruits to the All India Services and the Central Civil Services before they move to their own service academies.
    4. Who administers it: It functions under the Department of Personnel and Training, and was formed in 1959 by merging the earlier IAS Training School at Delhi and the IAS Staff College at Shimla.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “[2024, GS1, 15 marks] Despite comprehensive policies for equity and social justice, underprivileged sections are not yet getting the full benefits of affirmative action envisaged by the Constitution. Comment.”

  • State of exception

    State of exception

    Why in the News

    The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) has expressed “grave concern” at reports of the law enforcement apparatus resorting to violence, physical and otherwise, against minority ethnic and ethno religious groups, Dalits and non citizens. This is India’s first review by the Committee since 2007, and India ratified the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) in 1968. The Committee also recorded that India has not provided detailed and updated information on the state’s inquiries and sanctions arising from allegations of such violence. The government’s position before the Committee is that caste bias falls outside Article 1 of the Convention because caste is not synonymous with race. The Committee has read the Convention as covering all forms of discrimination based on inherited status. The tension is between a state defending a definitional boundary to keep caste a domestic matter and a treaty body reading descent into the Convention to bring caste inside international scrutiny.

    What is the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination?

    1. A treaty body: CERD is a body of independent experts that monitors how states that have ratified ICERD implement it.
    2. Periodic review: States file periodic reports and the Committee issues concluding observations recording its concerns and its recommendations.
    3. No enforcement power: Concluding observations are not binding and carry no sanction, so their effect runs through the reporting obligation and reputational exposure.

    Why does the caste and race question decide the Committee’s jurisdiction?

    1. The government’s reading: Article 1 of ICERD defines racial discrimination by race, colour, descent, and national or ethnic origin, and the government argues that caste is not race and therefore sits outside that definition.
    2. The Committee’s reading: The Committee treats discrimination based on inherited status as covered, which brings caste within the Convention through the descent limb rather than the race limb.
    3. What actually turns on it: If caste falls outside Article 1, India owes the Committee no account of caste discrimination at all, so the argument is jurisdictional rather than semantic.
    4. The scale of what the technicality would exclude: The position would place the situation of 200 million Dalits beyond the reach of international review. The underlying facts would remain undisputed.

    What specific practices did the Committee flag?

    1. Manual cleaning of sewers: The practice continues despite a law prohibiting it.
    2. Treatment of Rohingya Muslims: Hate speech against them, their poor living conditions, and their mass refoulement, meaning return to a territory where they face persecution.
    3. Citizenship deprivation: Mass deprivation of citizenship through the National Register of Citizens (NRC).
    4. Electoral roll deletions: Large scale deletions arising from the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls.
    5. Statutes used against civil society: Use of the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, 2010, the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967, the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958 and the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002 to hamper the work of civil society organisations.
    6. A gap in the criminal code: The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 does not expressly criminalise racist hate speech.
    7. Exemptions in forest law: The Forest (Conservation) Amendment Act, 2023 exempts “national security” projects from consultative decision making.

    Why is the data gap the enabling condition?

    1. Enumeration is overdue: A much delayed Census means suitably disaggregated data on disenfranchised communities does not exist in current form.
    2. Crime data arrives late: Slow release of National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data delays any independent check on recorded offences against Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.
    3. Special measures run on stale figures: Affirmative action is being implemented on 2011 Census data, which can mask a regression in the socioeconomic status of Scheduled Tribes and Adivasis.
    4. The effect is no longer administrative: The absence of data has moved past lethargy into actively impeding independent verification of the state’s own claims about fighting caste and faith based discrimination.

    What has happened to the domestic accountability machinery?

    1. Accreditation at risk: The Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions (GANHRI), the peer body that accredits national human rights institutions against the Paris Principles, recommended a downgrade of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) last year.
    2. The stated grounds: The appointment of police officers to investigative roles within the Commission, and a lack of pluralism in its composition.
    3. The consequence: With the domestic institution weakened, a treaty body review becomes the surviving external check rather than a supplement to a working domestic one.

    Domestic matter or international accountability?

    1. The sovereignty claim: The government treats the caste question as an internal matter and has dismissed the Committee’s concerns as politically motivated.
    2. The counter position: A definitional objection raised at the treaty body removes an entire class of discrimination from review without disputing that the discrimination occurs.
    3. Who is left carrying it: With the state contesting jurisdiction, the work of raising these issues in multilateral fora falls to civil society organisations, which are themselves the subject of the Committee’s concern about the use of regulatory and criminal law against them.

    What does the road ahead require?

    1. Institutional independence: Restoring the independence of the NHRC, beginning with the composition and appointment concerns that triggered the accreditation review.
    2. Criminal law: Expressly criminalising racist hate speech, which the current code does not do.
    3. Affirmative action: Supportive affirmative action, extended rather than narrowed, for the communities the measures are meant to reach.
    4. Data: Collecting and publishing disaggregated data on the affected communities.
    5. Electoral process: Improving the transparency of electoral roll revisions.
    6. Enforcement: Strengthening enforcement of existing protective law overall.

    Challenges to treaty body review as a check on caste discrimination

    1. No individual complaint route: India has not made the declaration under Article 14 of ICERD, so an individual or a group in India cannot petition the Committee directly. Eg. States that have made the Article 14 declaration allow individual communications, and India’s absence from that list leaves domestic courts as the only forum. Fix. Make the Article 14 declaration, which is a unilateral act requiring no amendment to the Convention.
    2. The evidence base is state controlled: The Committee reviews what the state chooses to report, so a gap in official data becomes a gap in the review itself. Eg. Shadow reports by non governmental organisations are the main corrective, which is why restrictions on their foreign funding directly shape what the Committee sees. Fix. Require the state report to be tabled domestically before submission, so its omissions are contested at home first.
    3. Long reporting gaps defeat periodicity: The Convention requires reports every two years and states file many years late with no consequence. Eg. Several states parties carry reports overdue by more than a decade on the Committee’s own schedule. Fix. Apply the review in the absence of a report procedure on a fixed timetable, so a missing report does not postpone scrutiny.
    4. Recommendations have no domestic legal effect: A concluding observation creates no right enforceable in an Indian court, since a treaty requires enabling legislation under Article 253 of the Constitution to become domestic law. Eg. Courts have used unincorporated treaty obligations as an interpretive aid rather than as a source of enforceable rights, as in Vishaka v. State of Rajasthan (1997). Fix. Route the recommendations through the NHRC’s statutory annual report to Parliament, so each produces a documented government response.

    Conclusion

    The dispute is not over whether the discrimination occurs but over whether an international body may examine it, and the two positions cannot both hold: a Convention read to cover inherited status, and a state reading that places caste outside its scope. What keeps the disagreement unresolvable is that the evidence which would settle either claim is the same disaggregated data the state has not produced.

    Back2Basics

    1. Statutory basis: It was constituted under the Protection of Human Rights Act, 1993.
    2. Composition: It is chaired by a former Chief Justice of India or a former judge of the Supreme Court, with members including a serving or former Chief Justice of a High Court and persons with knowledge of human rights.
    3. Powers: It inquires into complaints of human rights violation, exercises the powers of a civil court during inquiry, and may visit places of detention.
    4. Recommendatory character: Its findings are recommendations to the government concerned, which must report the action taken, and the Commission cannot enforce them itself.

    “[2023, GS1, 15 marks] Why is caste identity in India both fluid and static?”

  • How JNU’s admission model gives marginalised students a leg-up

    Why in the News

    A division bench of the Delhi High Court has allowed Jawaharlal Nehru University to continue applying its “deprivation points” model in admissions, subject to the final outcome of the challenge to it. That challenge was brought by an aspirant to a postgraduate course at the university, and the substantive plea is still being heard by a single judge. The model, in place in some form since the 1970s, awards additional points on the entrance test score to candidates from backward districts, to women and transgender applicants, and to Kashmiri migrants. What is contested is whether adding measured points for regional and structural disadvantage produces a truer ranking of ability, or whether it displaces the entrance test as the basis of selection.

    What is the deprivation points model?

    1. A weighting added to the entrance score: Applicants to undergraduate and postgraduate courses can be awarded a maximum of 12 deprivation points, which are added to the entrance test score before final merit is determined.
    2. It targets disadvantage the reservation categories do not capture: The points are directed at candidates from backward regions, at women and transgender persons, and at displaced groups, cutting across social category.
    3. It is unique to one university: No other institution in the country operates a comparable points based deprivation weighting in admissions.
    4. Its age is part of its standing: The model has been part of the university’s admissions process in some form since the 1970s.

    How are the points calculated?

    1. The district of origin is the first determinant: Districts are classified for the current admissions cycle into Quartile 1, meaning backward, and Quartile 2, meaning relatively less backward.
    2. Four Census indicators fix the quartile: The classification uses the percentage of female illiteracy, the percentage of agricultural workers, the percentage of rural population, and the percentage of households with no toilet within the premises.
    3. Undergraduate weighting: A candidate gets six points for a Quartile 1 district and four points for a Quartile 2 district.
    4. Postgraduate weighting: The corresponding figures are three points and two points respectively.
    5. Kashmiri migrants: The system provides five deprivation points to Kashmiri migrant candidates.
    6. Female and transgender candidates, higher band: They receive seven points where they fall within categories including Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe, Other Backward Classes, Person with Disability, Quartile 1 or Quartile 2.
    7. Female and transgender candidates, base band: They receive five points where they are from the unreserved category and do not fall in either district quartile.
    8. Which programmes it covers: Points are awarded for undergraduate, postgraduate, certificate of proficiency and advanced diploma of proficiency programmes, and doctoral programmes were excluded in 2017 after the university adopted the 2016 University Grants Commission admission guidelines.

    How has the system changed over time?

    1. The parameters have never been fixed: Both the number of points and the criteria used to identify deprivation have been revised repeatedly over the decades.
    2. It was withdrawn once and brought back: The system was withdrawn in 1984 and restored from 1995-96 after pressure from the students’ union, in a modified form.
    3. Research degrees were carved out in 2017: Deprivation points were discontinued for Master of Philosophy and doctoral admissions. They were retained for undergraduate and postgraduate admissions.
    4. Controversy has tracked it throughout: The model has drawn objection at intervals since its introduction, of which the present writ challenge is the latest instance.

    Why was the system put in place?

    1. To stop the university selecting for prior advantage: It was introduced so that the university did not merely draw students who had already benefited from greater educational opportunities.
    2. The founding mandate was national, not local: The university was created by an Act of Parliament and was not established for Delhi alone, so it was expected to draw talent from across the country.
    3. Test scores are an incomplete measure of merit: Academic performance alone cannot be treated as a complete measure of merit when candidates come from vastly different social, economic and regional circumstances.
    4. It equalises the conditions of competition: Districts were grouped by objective indicators of development, with candidates from more deprived regions receiving additional weightage, so that the comparison between candidates is made on more comparable terms.

    Does adding points to an entrance score redefine merit or dilute it?

    1. The innovation is that it is not category based: The model turns on the structural deprivation and inequalities that shape educational opportunity, rather than on the social category a candidate belongs to.
    2. It reaches disadvantage that reservation does not: A quota operates on identity, so it cannot distinguish between a candidate from a metropolitan school and one from a district with high female illiteracy and no household sanitation.
    3. Geography carries socio historical marginalisation: Any understanding of merit becomes more complicated once region and location are recognised as determinants of the opportunity a candidate had.
    4. The counter case is procedural, not ideological: The challenge before the Delhi High Court does not dispute that regional disadvantage exists, it questions whether an award of up to 12 points on an entrance score is a proportionate way to correct for it.

    What does cross country evidence show about targeted admission measures?

    1. The practice is widespread but not universal: Around one third of the world’s countries use affirmative action or targeted quotas to improve educational access, according to the 2026 Global Education Monitoring Report of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
    2. Geography is an accepted basis elsewhere too: Those measures include quotas and weightings based on geographic or development indicators, not only on social identity.
    3. Five countries are named as showing results: The report records that India, Brazil, China, Israel and Sri Lanka have seen increased enrolment among under represented groups because of targeted measures.
    4. The evidence establishes direction, not design: The report speaks to enrolment outcomes at the national level, so it supports the case for targeting without settling how many points a specific indicator should carry.

    Challenges to the deprivation points model

    1. District level indicators miss intra district inequality: A quartile score attaches to a whole district, so an affluent urban household inside a backward district collects the same points as a landless household in the same district. Eg. Backward districts routinely contain a district headquarters town with private schooling of metropolitan standard. Fix. Compute the weighting from the candidate’s school and block of study rather than from the district of domicile alone.
    2. The indicator set is anchored to ageing Census data: Female illiteracy, agricultural worker share, rural population share and household sanitation are drawn from Census figures that predate a decade of change in each. Eg. Household sanitation coverage changed substantially across districts after the national sanitation mission, which the underlying figures do not reflect. Fix. Recompute district quartiles against the Census 2027 returns and fix a mandatory revision cycle thereafter.
    3. Domicile is provable and therefore gameable: Points that depend on the district of origin create an incentive to establish a domicile record in a Quartile 1 district. Eg. Domicile and residence certificates for educational benefit have been a recurring subject of litigation in State admissions. Fix. Verify the district claim against the school of last attendance rather than against a residence certificate.
    4. Additive points interact unpredictably with statutory quotas: A candidate can hold both a reserved category seat entitlement and a high deprivation score, which compounds two corrections applied for overlapping reasons. Eg. A Scheduled Caste woman from a Quartile 1 district draws the maximum deprivation band on top of category reservation. Fix. Publish the category wise cut off effect of the points each cycle, so the combined weighting is visible and can be calibrated.
    5. Admission support is not the same as completion support: Points widen entry, but the language, foundational and financial gaps that follow entry are not addressed by the admission formula. Eg. Dropout and completion gaps for first generation entrants persist even in institutions with strong entry side affirmative action. Fix. Attach a funded bridge programme and mentorship entitlement to every candidate admitted on deprivation points.
    6. The scheme rests on university policy, not on statute: Because the model is an executive decision of the academic council, it can be withdrawn or curtailed without any legislative process. Eg. It was withdrawn in 1984 and restored only after sustained student mobilisation. Fix. Embed the deprivation weighting in the university’s statutes so that any change requires approval by the university’s statutory bodies and the visitor.

    Conclusion

    The model’s real claim is not that it helps disadvantaged candidates, which any quota does, but that it measures disadvantage on indicators that a category based quota cannot see, and applies the correction as a graded score rather than a reserved seat. Its weakness is the same as its strength, since a weighting anchored to district averages and dated indicators will always be blunt at the level of the individual candidate. The Delhi High Court has left the system operating for now, and the substantive question of whether a 12 point addition to an entrance score is a proportionate correction is still before a single judge.

    Affirmative action in Indian higher education

    1. What it covers: Affirmative action in admissions operates through reserved seats, relaxed qualifying marks and, in a small number of institutions, additional weightage on entrance scores.
    2. The statutory reservation in central institutions: Central educational institutions reserve 15 per cent of seats for Scheduled Castes, 7.5 per cent for Scheduled Tribes, 27 per cent for Other Backward Classes excluding the creamy layer, and 10 per cent for the Economically Weaker Sections.
    3. The access problem it addresses: The Gross Enrolment Ratio in higher education stands at about 28.4 per cent, well short of the National Education Policy 2020 target of 50 per cent by 2035.
    4. The scale of the system: India runs the world’s second largest higher education system, with total enrolment of roughly 4.65 crore students across more than 1,168 universities and 45,473 colleges.

    Constitutional framework governing affirmative action in education

    1. Article 15(4): Enables the state to make special provision for the advancement of socially and educationally backward classes and for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.
    2. Article 15(5): Enables reservation in admission to educational institutions, including private unaided institutions, other than minority institutions.
    3. Article 15(6): Enables reservation of up to 10 per cent of seats for the Economically Weaker Sections among citizens not covered by the earlier clauses.
    4. Article 29(2): Bars denial of admission to any state maintained or state aided educational institution on grounds only of religion, race, caste, language or any of them.
    5. Article 46: Directs the state to promote with special care the educational and economic interests of the weaker sections, in particular the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.
    6. Article 21A: Guarantees free and compulsory education to all children between six and fourteen years, which is the foundation stage the higher education gaps trace back to.

    Laws and rules governing reservation in educational institutions

    1. Central Educational Institutions (Reservation in Admission) Act, 2006: Prescribes the category wise reservation of seats in central educational institutions and provides for annual increases in intake so that unreserved seats are not reduced.
    2. Constitution (One Hundred and Third Amendment) Act, 2019: Inserted Articles 15(6) and 16(6) to create the Economically Weaker Sections reservation in education and public employment.
    3. Central Educational Institutions (Reservation in Teachers’ Cadre) Act, 2019: Restores the institution as the unit for computing teaching post reservation, in place of the department wise roster.
    4. Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009: Requires private unaided schools to reserve at least 25 per cent of entry level seats for children from disadvantaged groups and weaker sections.
    5. University Grants Commission Act, 1956: Establishes the Commission with power to determine and maintain standards in higher education. The Commission issues admission guidelines binding on universities under that power.

    Government initiatives for educational access of disadvantaged groups

    1. PM Young Achievers Scholarship Award Scheme for Vibrant India: Provides scholarships to students from Other Backward Classes, Economically Backward Classes and De notified Tribes for schooling and higher education.
    2. National Fellowship for Scheduled Caste Students: Funds Master of Philosophy and doctoral research by Scheduled Caste scholars in recognised universities and institutions.
    3. National Overseas Scholarship: Funds postgraduate and doctoral study abroad for Scheduled Caste, De notified Tribe, landless agricultural labourer and traditional artisan candidates.
    4. Ishan Uday: A special scholarship scheme of the University Grants Commission for students from the North Eastern region pursuing general degree and technical courses.
    5. Pradhan Mantri Uchchatar Shiksha Protsahan Yojana: Provides central sector scholarships to meritorious students from low income families for undergraduate and postgraduate study.

    Back2Basics: Jawaharlal Nehru University

    1. What it is: A central university funded through the University Grants Commission and administered under the Ministry of Education, with the President of India as its visitor.
    2. Its academic character: It is organised around schools and centres rather than conventional departments, and is oriented predominantly towards postgraduate and research programmes.

    Matching Previous Year Question

    “[2024, GS1, 15 marks] Despite comprehensive policies for equity and social justice, underprivileged sections are not yet getting the full benefits of affirmative action envisaged by the Constitution. Comment.”

  • Growing feeling of regionalism is an important factor in the generation of demand for a separate state. Discuss.

  • How do the Indian debates on secularism differ from the debates in the West?

  • Debate the issue of whether and how contemporary movements for assertion of Dalit identity work towards annihilation of caste.

  • What is the basis of regionalism? Is it that unequal distribution of benefits of development on regional basis eventually promotes regionalism? Substantiate your answer.