The winter session of Parliament ended with a big fight between the treasury and Opposition benches on the issue of their contribution to the legacy of BR Ambedkar, India’s biggest social emancipator and one of the key architects of the Constitution, and whether home minister Amit Shah spoke disrespectfully about him in his speech in the Rajya Sabha. On the penultimate day of the session, the fight took a completely different turn, with the BJP and the Congress accusing each
- India still does not have political equality in terms of equal social representation in the executiveAdoption of universal franchise did not automatically lead to political equality in terms of equal representation in the executive. 86.4% of the members of India’s first council of ministers were from caste groups which were not Scheduled Caste (SC), Scheduled Tribe (ST) or other backward classes (OBC). The skew was even bigger in terms of chief ministers of states. While representation has definitely improved over time, non-SC/ST/OBC persons, or the “upper castes”, still have the largest share in chief ministers and council of ministers in India. The social manifestation of political inequality is more acute for SC/ST population than OBCs, whose representation is closer to their estimated share in population, which varies between 40%-50% across various surveys.
- Which party has facilitated social inclusion within India’s political executive?An easy way to answer this question is to look at the relative share of various social groups among chief ministers and council of ministers from three broad party groups: Congress, BJP, and others. The relative share of a social group is calculated by dividing its share in chief ministers and council of ministers of a particular party with their share in the chief ministers and council of ministers overall. A value higher than one would mean that a party has given greater representation to that social group. The Congress shows the highest relative share for non-SC/ST/OBCs in both the chief ministers and the council of ministers datasets. This number is the lowest for the BJP. As far as OBCs are concerned, the BJP has the highest relative share for chief ministers and second highest relative share among council of ministers while the Congress’s numbers are the lowest. However, the Congress is ahead of the BJP in relative share of SCs in both the chief minister and council of minister datasets. To be sure, some of the BJP’s advantage on this could be attributed to the fact that it started politics in an era when social equality was more widespread in politics than the period before it.
- And caste is still a key driver of economic inequalityA simple comparison of social group-wise relative shares in the poor and richest parts of the population brings it out clearly. SCs and STs are over-represented among the poorest 50% of the population by monthly per capita expenditure (MPCE) while non-SC/ST/OBC population is underrepresented here. The situation reverses itself when one is looking at the top 5% of the population. While OBCs seem to be proportionately represented in both these groups, there are likely large intragroup inequalities among them.
- But caste is not the only factorTo be sure, caste is not the only driver of economic inequality in India. While the trends above hold when looking at social groups at the country level or within states, they may not interstate. For example, the average MPCE of an SC person in Tamil Nadu is higher than that of the average upper caste person in Bihar. HT had pointed this out in an October 2023 story using the summary MPCE data collected in the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS). The detailed household consumption survey data released earlier this year confirms it. This shows that there are nuanced routes to eradicating economic inequality which might be getting lost in the din that has been created by the political class.
Roshan Kishore is the Data and Political Economy Editor at Hindustan Times. He heads the newsroom's data journalism team, which produces Number Theory, a daily data-driven feature for the print edition and the HT app. Number Theory uses data analysis and story-telling based on it to add value to the newsroom’s daily coverage by putting stories in a larger context on a range of issues, including politics, macroeconomy, markets, global affairs and climate. Under his leadership HT’s data journalism work has established itself as a niche product in Indian journalism and pushed the boundaries of marrying academic rigour with news sense and speed. Along with writing and editing data stories, he has also been writing a weekly political economy column called Terms of Trade for HT Premium. A trained economist with an MPhil degree from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Kishore has also been a visiting fellow at the Centre for Advanced Studies of India (CASI) at the University of Pennsylvania. Along with his journalistic work, his writings have also appeared in journals such as the Economic and Political Weekly and working papers for CASI and UNESCAP.
Abhishek Jha is Assistant Editor-Data at Hindustan Times. He uses statistical programming to generate newsworthy insights from large datasets. He is part of the team that produces Number Theory, a daily data story feature of the paper’s print edition. Since March 2024, he has been writing Weather Bee, a weekly column for the Hindustan Times website. He is a chemical engineer by training, who specialises in stories related to weather, climate, and the environment. Jha has been at HT since 2018, where he offers data-driven perspective and analysis on politics, environment, weather, climate, economy and society. His work includes data coverage of elections in India and abroad, including the 2019 and 2024 Lok Sabha elections; the disasters and extreme weather resulting from changing climate, such as floods, droughts, heat waves, cold waves, and dwindling snow cap in the Himalayas; the factors that drive poor air quality in northern India; the changing patterns of land use; the Covid-19 pandemic and its impact on labour market conditions; the changing pattern of consumer spending seen in the new consumer spending surveys; and social norms seen in the surveys such as the National Family Health Survey.
Nishant Ranjan has been working as a data journalist with Hindustan Times since 2023. In this short period, he has established a niche for creating original datasets and utilising them to produce journalistic work that pushes the boundaries of journalism. The list of datasets and stories done by him include the following: a dataset of all 717 chief ministers India has had since 1952, a dataset of all 3,350 members of India’s council of ministers, a dataset of all 190 deputy chief ministers in India and a dataset of all 279 Supreme Court judges in India (1950-2025). He has also profiled each elected Muslim MLA/MP since 1952. He is a mining engineer by training who decided to pursue a Master's in Development Studies from TISS after working in a coal mine for 10 months. He also worked as a research associate at the Centre for Policy Research, researching local governance in India. He also has a keen interest in analyzing electoral politics and political executives in India.