Caste Discrimination and the Distance Between Law and Life

by Ravindra Dhanka

In government documents and political speeches caste discrimination is often described as a wound that is healing through laws and welfare schemes, yet in the everyday reality of my community it continues to shape access to education, employment, land, health care, and even self confidence in ways that legal language alone has not been able to erase.

Schemes meant for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes are announced with promise and pride yet they pass through layers of administration, delay, corruption, and political filtering, and by the time they reach villages they often arrive late, incomplete, or dependent on personal connections rather than on rights.

Dr B R Ambedkar never treated caste as a moral weakness of individuals but as a powerful social system that controlled opportunity and dignity, and he warned that without destroying this system at its roots political equality would remain hollow despite constitutional guarantees.

In my work I see how caste continues to organize daily life even when few openly speak its name because it silently decides whose children remain in school, whose illnesses receive timely treatment, whose land remains protected, whose voices are interrupted, and whose applications move quickly through offices.

Scholarships arrive after students have already dropped out, hostels function without proper care, health programs exist without transport access, and each such delay quietly trains the poor to accept injustice as normal administrative difficulty.

Caste discrimination today often hides inside procedure rather than open insult because it survives through paperwork, waiting, lost files, repeated visits, and unanswered complaints where nobody publicly denies your right yet the system quietly refuses to act with urgency.

Ambedkar imagined annihilation of caste as a social revolution that would redistribute dignity, opportunity, and power rather than simply offer symbolic inclusion in existing hierarchies, yet when current policy retreats from this vision inequality continues through softer language.

Budget cuts to welfare, reduced institutional support, and increasing reliance on personal networks slowly convert rights into favors, and favors always strengthen hierarchy because they concentrate power in the hands of those who already control access.

The damage of caste discrimination is not only economic but psychological because persistent delay and denial slowly erode self belief and ambition across generations as children learn early that effort alone is never enough.

Until caste is confronted not only through laws but through strong public investment, firm accountability, and serious social reform the promise of equality will remain suspended between hope and disappointment for millions in communities like mine.