Coverage
Reservation policy, caste enumeration and census, welfare-scheme targeting.
In focus
Each state built its case on its own commission's evidence after India's Supreme Court allowed the split in 2024. Federal records count Dalits in central jobs, not which Dalit communities hold them.
A census produces data. Data by itself does not produce equality.
Lok Sabha seats reserved for Scheduled Castes since the 2008 delimitation, up from 79.
Three years after Darshan Solanki's death, another Dalit student has died at IIT Bombay, and the institute's first account again centred on the student. Students want many of the same reforms.
… there was a vaccine to cure Covid, and similarly, the Rohith Act is a cure for casteism.
Posts reserved for Scheduled Castes in India's 45 central universities that stood vacant on 1 April 2021.
Census 2027 asks everyone outside the SC and ST lists to write in a caste. Who sorts those answers, and which Dalits the list leaves out, is still open.
Two opposite designs have one identical outcome: the OBC and the General category [castes outside the quotas] – the population a caste census was revived specifically to make visible – remain, by design, unseen.
The Supreme Court has again refused Scheduled Caste status to Christian converts. The 1950 clause it enforces would, on its letter, have excluded Ambedkar himself when he converted.
What can possibly be done is to exclude the economically better SCs from economic concession and various caste-based subsidies but not from job reservation.
Share of federal government posts held by Scheduled Castes on 1 January 2026, against a 15% quota. How those posts divide among the communities on the list is not recorded centrally.
Shankersinh Vaghela dared reservation's opponents to clean excreta for Rs 50,000 a month. The BJP's reply, that the practice is gone, echoes an official definition the dead don't fit.
Each state built its case on its own commission's evidence after India's Supreme Court allowed the split in 2024. Federal records count Dalits in central jobs, not which Dalit communities hold them.
Census 2027 asks everyone outside the SC and ST lists to write in a caste. Who sorts those answers, and which Dalits the list leaves out, is still open.
The Supreme Court froze the 2026 campus equity rules, but the 2012 rules, anti-ragging rules and the Atrocities Act still apply. What each gives you, and where to complain.
Dalit seats follow the Scheduled Caste count and a freeze that lifts after this census, not the new caste question. What else the count changes depends on what the state publishes.
When the Cockroach Janta Party's founder said he was Dalit, replies on X called him "against Merit". The same argument ran through India's year, from campus rules to an exam scandal.
A 2024 court ruling struck down OBC classifications made in 2010–2012 and called for a fresh, commission-led study. West Bengal's new BJP government restored the pre-2010 list before that study began.
Oxfam India and Newslaundry's 2022 count found general-category journalists in 191 of 218 leadership posts. Dalit journalists who built their own newsrooms explain what that does to the news.
The Supreme Court has again refused Scheduled Caste status to Christian converts. The 1950 clause it enforces would, on its letter, have excluded Ambedkar himself when he converted.
On 1 April 2021, 2,389 of the 5,737 posts reserved for Dalits in India's 45 central universities, and 1,199 of the 3,097 reserved for Adivasis, were vacant, the education ministry told Parliament. Parliament's committee on Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe welfare, examining faculty hiring at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi in 2022 and the University of Allahabad in 2025, refused the government's shortage explanation and pointed to selection panels that declare candidates unsuitable.
