(a) Bring out the various issues involved in Dalit movements in India. (20 marks) (b) Critically examine the dialectics between…

(a) Issues in Dalit movements

Dalit movements have moved from reform to assertion, and their issues overlap as demands for recognition, redistribution and representation.

• Dignity and untouchability: temple-entry and water-access struggles such as Ambedkar's Mahad satyagraha (1927); Phule's Satyashodhak Samaj (1873) and Periyar's Self-Respect Movement (1925) attacked Brahmanical hierarchy; Ambedkar's conversion to Buddhism with followers (1956) rejected it altogether.
• Political representation: separate electorates and the Poona Pact (1932), reserved seats, and autonomous parties such as the RPI (1957) and the BSP (1984) that seek to exercise power directly.
• Land and livelihood: landlessness, bonded and low-paid labour, and manual scavenging (prohibited by the 2013 Act) remain central; the Dalit Panthers (1972) combined these demands with militant resistance to caste violence.
• Violence and law: the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act 1989 is weakly enforced; NCRB recorded about 57,600 cases of crimes against Scheduled Castes in 2022, 13 per cent more than in 2021. Khairlanji (2006), Una (2016) and the death of Rohith Vemula (2016) became rallying points.
• Reservation: demands to extend it to promotions and the private sector, disputes over the creamy layer, and the Supreme Court's 2024 judgment in State of Punjab v. Davinder Singh (6:1) allowing states to sub-classify Scheduled Castes, which exposes divisions among Dalit groups.
• Culture and identity: Dalit literature, Ambedkarite Buddhism and the reclaiming of icons challenge the cultural dominance of upper castes.
• Caste and class: Ambedkar saw caste as a hierarchy of social status that class politics alone cannot dissolve, in contrast to Marxist readings that reduce it to class.
• Gender: Dalit women face caste and patriarchal violence together, and Dalit feminists argue that mainstream Dalit and women's movements overlook this.

These issues show that Dalit movements seek both material gains and social respect, and that internal differences, violence and unmet promises keep the agenda open.

(b) Development and environment

The relation is dialectical, a conflict and an interdependence at once: development consumes the environment on which it depends.

Conflict:

• Growth draws on land, water, forests and minerals, producing displacement and pollution. The Lancet Planetary Health (2020) estimated 1.67 million deaths from air pollution in India in 2019, 17.8 per cent of all deaths.
• Costs fall unevenly. Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha distinguish "omnivores" who consume most resources from "ecosystem people" who depend on local nature and "ecological refugees" displaced by projects. Guha and Martinez-Alier call the resistance of the poor "environmentalism of the poor": Chipko (1970s), the Narmada Bachao Andolan (1985) on Sardar Sarovar displacement, and Niyamgiri, where after the Supreme Court's 2013 ruling in Orissa Mining Corporation v. MoEF all 12 gram sabhas rejected Vedanta's bauxite mining.

Interdependence: degradation erodes health, water and farm productivity, so the Brundtland Report (1987) defined sustainable development as meeting present needs without compromising future generations. India's response includes the Environment (Protection) Act 1986, the National Green Tribunal Act 2010, the precautionary and polluter-pays principles adopted in Vellore Citizens' Welfare Forum (1996), the Forest Rights Act 2006 and the 2070 net-zero pledge.

Critique:

• Sustainability can become technocratic: critics say impact assessment and clearances can turn into procedural formalities.
• Ecological modernisation trusts technology and markets, while degrowth and post-development thinkers (Escobar, Shiva) question growth itself.
• "Green" projects such as big dams can themselves displace people.

Verdict: the contradiction is real but not absolute; it eases when development is redefined around equity and community consent, as in the gram sabha decisions at Niyamgiri, and not around GDP alone.

(c) Changing nature of the industrial working class

The class has shifted from a stable, unionised factory workforce to a fragmented, largely informal one.

• Earlier core: permanent mill and factory workers with strong unions; the Bombay textile strike (1982) and Ahmedabad mill closures (Breman and Shah, Working in the Mill No More, 2004) mark its decline.
• Contractualisation: contract workers rose from 23.1 per cent of factory workers in 2002–03 to 40.2 per cent in 2021–22 (Annual Survey of Industries).
• Informality: about 90 per cent of workers are informal (ILO–IHD 2024), many being migrant workers recruited by contractors.
• Gig work: NITI Aayog estimated 77 lakh gig workers in 2020–21; Guy Standing's "precariat" describes this insecurity.
• Law: the Industrial Relations Code (in force from 21.11.2025) raises the threshold for prior permission for layoffs and closures from 100 to 300 workers and permits fixed-term employment; the Code on Social Security covers gig and platform workers.

Collective bargaining has weakened as the workforce fragmented.