Social empowerment and affirmative action

The first principle

Empowerment is the expansion of a person's ability to make strategic life choices where that ability was earlier denied. A group is socially empowered when it has the resources to act, the agency to decide and the achievements that follow, so a law, a quota or an app empowers only if it moves all three. This explains why reservation has lifted some families but not whole communities, and why digital technology can both empower and exclude.

The core

What social empowerment means

• Naila Kabeer (1999) described empowerment as a process with three linked dimensions: resources, agency (the capacity to set goals and act on them) and achievements (the well being outcomes that result). A woman who owns land but cannot decide how to use it has resources without empowerment.
• The groups concerned are Scheduled Castes (SCs), Scheduled Tribes (STs), Other Backward Classes (OBCs), religious minorities, women, persons with disabilities, transgender persons and the elderly, each facing a different barrier, from caste stigma and land loss to patriarchy, inaccessible spaces and dependence in old age.

The constitutional basis of affirmative action

• Article 15(4), added by the First Amendment in 1951, lets the state make special provisions for socially and educationally backward classes, SCs and STs; Article 15(5), added by the 93rd Amendment in 2005, extends this to admission in private educational institutions other than minority institutions.
• Article 16(4) permits reservation in posts for backward classes not adequately represented, and Article 16(4A), added by the 77th Amendment in 1995, permits reservation in promotion for SCs and STs.
• Article 46 asks the state to promote the educational and economic interests of the weaker sections, and Articles 330 and 332 reserve seats for SCs and STs in the Lok Sabha and state assemblies.
• The National Commissions for Scheduled Castes (Article 338), Scheduled Tribes (Article 338A, 2003) and Backward Classes (Article 338B, 2018) watch over these safeguards.

Two major legal initiatives against discrimination of Scheduled Tribes

• The Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 punishes humiliation, land grabbing and violence against SCs and STs through special courts, and the Forest Rights Act, 2006 corrects what its preamble calls a historical injustice by recognising individual and community rights over forest land; the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996 adds gram sabha control over local resources.

Dimensions

• Social. Dignity and freedom from stigma cannot come from a quota alone; they need social reform and enforcement of anti discrimination law.
• Economic. Jobs, land, credit and skills are the resources without which agency is hollow.
• Political. Reserved seats in legislatures and panchayats give voice, and the women's reservation law of 2023 (106th Amendment) extends this to women once delimitation after the next Census is done.
• Legal. Rights based laws such as the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (RPwD) Act, 2016 and the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019 turn welfare into enforceable entitlements.

In practice

Why the underprivileged have not received the full benefit of affirmative action

• Capture by the better off. A few castes within each list take a large share of benefits; the Commission to examine sub categorisation of OBCs (Rohini Commission, set up 2017, report submitted July 2023) studied this for central OBC lists; its 2018 analysis of central jobs and admissions found that about a quarter of OBC castes had received about 97 per cent of the benefits, while nearly a thousand castes had received none.
• Unfilled and backlog vacancies. Reserved posts, especially at senior levels and in faculty positions, often stay vacant because of "not found suitable" decisions and slow recruitment.
• Shrinking public employment. Disinvestment, contractual hiring and outsourcing reduce the pool of reserved jobs, while the private sector has no reservation.
• Weak schooling. First generation learners from poor schools cannot compete even within the quota, so the seats go to those already better placed.
• Lack of awareness and documents. Caste certificates and knowledge of schemes are hardest to obtain for the most marginal, so benefits flow to an elite within each group.

Judgements

• Indra Sawhney v Union of India (1992): upheld 27 per cent OBC reservation, excluded the creamy layer and fixed a 50 per cent ceiling in ordinary cases.
• Jarnail Singh v Lachhmi Narain Gupta (2018): held that the state need not collect data on the backwardness of SCs and STs before giving reservation in promotion, but that the creamy layer principle can apply to them.
• Janhit Abhiyan v Union of India (2022): by three to two, upheld the 103rd Amendment's 10 per cent reservation for Economically Weaker Sections (EWS), holding that economic criteria alone can be a basis and that the 50 per cent ceiling is not inflexible.
• State of Punjab v Davinder Singh (August 2024): a seven judge bench, by six to one, allowed states to sub classify SCs on the basis of data, and four judges said a creamy layer should apply to SCs and STs too.

Disability: from charity to rights

• Models. The medical model locates disability in the body and seeks cure; the social model locates it in barriers such as stairs and attitudes; the rights based model of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD, 2006, ratified by India in 2007) treats persons with disabilities as rights holders owed equality and reasonable accommodation.
• Law. The RPwD Act, 2016 (Department of Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities, Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment) replaced the 1995 Act, raised recognised disabilities from 7 to 21, and provides 4 per cent reservation in government jobs and 5 per cent in higher education for persons with benchmark disability (40 per cent or more).
• Data. Census 2011 counted 2.68 crore persons with disabilities, 2.21 per cent of the population, which is thought to undercount, since the World Health Organization estimates a global prevalence near 16 per cent.
• Schemes. The Accessible India Campaign (Sugamya Bharat Abhiyan, December 2015) targets accessible buildings, transport and websites, and the Unique Disability ID card gives a single national certificate.
• Rajive Raturi v Union of India (November 2024): held that the accessibility rules under the RPwD Act were only guidelines and not binding standards, and directed the Union to frame mandatory accessibility rules within three months.

Why India needs an inclusive policy framework on disability

Disability overlaps with poverty, gender and rural residence, so a scheme that only certifies and pays a pension leaves the person outside school, work and public life. An inclusive framework would apply universal design to all new buildings, transport and software, count disability properly, support disabled children in mainstream schools and enforce the job quota.

Does digital technology promote social empowerment?

• Yes, in many ways. The Jan Dhan, Aadhaar and mobile trinity (JAM) and Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) send money straight to bank accounts, cutting leakage; the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) lets small sellers and self help groups under the Deendayal Antyodaya Yojana National Rural Livelihoods Mission (DAY NRLM) sell beyond the village; DigiLocker stores documents for people who move often; Bhashini (Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, 2022) offers services in Indian languages; and screen readers and captioning give persons with disabilities independent access.
• But it also excludes. The National Family Health Survey 5 (NFHS 5, 2019 to 2021) found that only 33 per cent of women had ever used the internet against 57 per cent of men, and the gap is wider in rural areas and among SC and ST households. Biometric authentication failures have denied rations and pensions to manual labourers and the elderly whose fingerprints do not register, and inaccessible apps shut out blind users.

Issues and way forward

• Elite capture within groups. Benefits concentrate among a few castes because there is no sub classification; data driven sub classification, as recommended by the Rohini Commission for OBCs and permitted for SCs in 2024, addresses this.
• Unfilled reserved posts. Vacancies persist because of slow recruitment and "not found suitable" decisions; special recruitment drives and time bound filling, as parliamentary committees on SC and ST welfare have repeatedly recommended, are the remedy.
• Shrinking public jobs. Skilling, entrepreneurship support such as Stand Up India and private sector diversity reporting can widen opportunity beyond public posts.
• Disability rules without teeth. Weak enforcement follows from guidelines that are not binding; the Rajive Raturi judgement requires mandatory standards, and accessibility audits should be linked to funding.
• Digital exclusion. A gender and caste divide in access can be narrowed through community digital literacy, women's phone ownership and an offline or manual override for every benefit, in line with the concern the Supreme Court recorded in the Aadhaar judgement (K S Puttaswamy v Union of India, 2018) that no genuine beneficiary should be denied a benefit because authentication fails.

Common confusions

• Creamy layer and sub classification. The creamy layer removes better off individuals from a group's benefit; sub classification divides the group's quota among castes within it.
• Reservation in appointment and in promotion. Article 16(4) covers appointment for all backward classes, while Article 16(4A) covers promotion for SCs and STs only.

For the exam

• Keyword bank: agency, resources, achievements, affirmative action, creamy layer, sub classification, backlog vacancies, EWS, benchmark disability, reasonable accommodation, universal design, social model, digital divide, DBT, assistive technology.
• Previous year questions: Practise the previous year questions on this topic →
• Use in an answer:
  • Introduction (data): Census 2011 counted 2.68 crore persons with disabilities, yet the World Health Organization estimates the true global prevalence at about one in six, which suggests that India's disabled are first undercounted and then underserved.
  • Introduction (judgement, quote or report): In Davinder Singh (2024) the Supreme Court accepted that reservation benefits had gone to a few castes within the Scheduled Castes, which explains why the most deprived still wait for the promise of the Constitution.
  • Conclusion: Affirmative action opened the door for millions, but empowerment will be complete only when good schooling, enforced rights and accessible design let the last person in each group walk through it.
  • Conclusion: Technology, quotas and laws are tools, and they empower only when they build the agency of the person they are meant to serve.