Paper short abstract:

As social discrimination continues to mark the contours of poverty, we investigate how and why Adivasis and Dalits remain at the bottom of the Indian social and economic hierarchy, drawing on fine-grained field research from across the length and breadth of the country.

Paper long abstract:

Economists have shown that the Indian economic boom has had little positive impact on those at the very bottom of India's social and economic hierarchies. Here we place the historically grounded social relations between Adivasis/ Dalits and other groups at the centre of an analysis of why and how this is the case under today's global neo-liberalism. We will introduce the findings of a major research programme that is detailed in some of the papers of this panel. Analysing the differences and specific material contexts, social relations and imaginations of Dalits and Adivasis, we suggest that village based oppression is being transformed into India-wide informalisation, that local inequality and power relations today are part of global processes while being shaped locally by historically hegemonic groups, and that while these processes affect both Adivasis and Dalits, there are significant differences between them which are important to consider. We argue that class as a social and economic relation of exploitation and surplus appropriation is central to caste discrimination and that individual social mobility - for instance through education or affirmative action - has definite limits as has, for now, collective social action.