Almost all founders are upper castes. Upper castes completely dominate most positions of power, from bureaucracy and judiciary to politics and entrepreneurship.
Indians will defend this by pointing out how Modi belongs to an "other backward castes" (OBC) category, conveniently skipping over the fact that this category was created as a political tool to gather votes and most OBCs face none of the discrimination the truly backward, lowest castes face (I also belong to OBC category fyi).
India's minorities, lower castes, and tribes - more than a third of the population - is heavily underrepresented in any position of power. In rural areas, caste discrimination is prevalent enough that lower caste people regularly get lynched for marrying someone from the upper caste.
I'm generally baffled and frustrated by the Indian unwillingness to acknowledge their privilege. It's turned into a meme at this point where everyone calls themselves middle class, from the finance minister, to Satya Nadella (whose father was the most powerful bureaucrat in his state of birth).
The president of India belongs to a Scheduled Tribe. If optics is what you are concerned about.
Some occupations like Law employ such a tiny percentage of the population, that Caste becomes too coarse grained to be the only dimension of analysis for the basis of privilege.
You probably will have a better chance of breaking into the top echelons of this industry by living in the right gated society in Delhi that puts you into contact with these entrenched folks rather than being the right caste in some remote Indian Village.
To look at a broader scale of occupational distribution, SC/ST folks have 23% affirmative action Quotas in Govt/State universities like IITs, IIMs and Medical Colleges. Is the issue that they are unable to compete in the Industry post college?
Caste based affirmative action quota is 52% with overall affirmative action quota at 63%.
Do you think more affirmative action is necessary to fix the problem?
At this point it just looks like "
The Floggings Will Continue Until Morale Improves".
You could also say no matter how large a portion you cut out of a pizza, you will never feed a hundred people if one pizza is all you have.
A huge % of reserved seats go empty, simply because there aren't enough candidates.
That should tell you where the problem is: most don't even make it all the way to higher education.
You have to first fix primary and secondary education. But to fix that, you have to first fix rural society where caste hierarchies are still dominant.
> A huge % of reserved seats go empty, simply because there aren't enough candidates.
This is an interesting point. A huge focus of Indian politics is lobbying groups from various lower caste communities asking for _more_ reservation. The fact that this point never reaches discussion, that the Indian schooling system is failing its students never makes airwaves gives me the feeling that Lower caste community leaders and politicians are _not_ interested in fixing the problem if it loses them their captive vote banks.
Rural India has serious problem in class and caste. Depressing state of things overall.
But I would note that you could have chosen a better example. This incident does not have any caste slur or anything to indicate that this was rooted in caste. Government teachers and employees power-tripping in their little fiefdoms is a common story across caste boundaries. I personally know of examples of upper caste folks facing violence in schools. One had their front teeth smashed by their teacher by "accident", but you can guess the type of environment where these accidents happen. This will also never make headlines since there is no caste angle to push.
Caste is a problem in Rural and to a smaller extent in Urban India. But you will also have to admit that our media and related political interests are hell bent on fanning the flames. The caste angle is brought into every petty bit of violence. So much that it becomes hard to believe even what may be genuine cases.
The American version of this would be race being highlighted if the victim is Black/Indigenous/Hispanic. A common reddit trope is if the victim's race isn't mentioned then they're white. If the perpetrator's race isn't mentioned then they aren't White/White-adjacent.
Scholarships spanning the whole length of education rather than reservations may be a better mechanism for improving opportunity in my opinion. It would also let you know if your scheme is working since with reservation, you just let potentially unprepared students through without fixing other prior systemic issues.
Curious about that - do the founders of big indian IT companies, like Infosys or Zoho, belong to a specific cast?