Class 12 Sociology Chapter 5 Patterns of Social Inequality and Exclusion NCERT Solutions

Q. How is social inequality different from the inequality of individuals?

Answer: The inequality of individuals comes from personal differences,
ability, effort or luck, and could in principle happen to anyone. Social inequality
is different: it is a pattern of unequal access to valued resources, such as money,
property, education, health and power, that repeats across entire groups
(a caste, a gender, a community) rather than affecting scattered individuals. It is
not simply economic either; it also involves gender, religion, ethnicity, language,
caste and disability. Most importantly, social inequality is systematic and
structured: it follows a definite, repeating pattern built into how society
works, unlike the inequality between two individuals, which can vary case by case.
As the chapter’s own opening example shows, even the hardest-working poor people
rarely rise out of poverty, which supports the chapter’s argument that something
beyond individual effort, a group-level, social cause, is holding an entire
category of people back.

Q. What are some of the features of social stratification?

Answer: Social stratification is the system by which categories of people
are ranked in a hierarchy that shapes their identity, relations and access to
resources. The chapter gives three key features:

First, stratification is a characteristic of society as a whole, not
simply a result of individual differences in ability. Technologically simple
hunting-gathering societies, which produce little, have only rudimentary
stratification, while societies that produce a surplus distribute it unequally
among social categories regardless of people’s innate abilities.

Second, stratification persists across generations. It is closely tied to
the family and the inheritance of resources: a person’s social position is
ascribed, meaning children assume the social positions of their parents.
Within the caste system, birth decides occupation, and this ascribed pattern is
reinforced by endogamy, marriage restricted to members of the same caste,
which prevents caste lines from blurring.

Third, stratification is supported by an ideology, a pattern of belief
that makes it seem fair or inevitable. The caste system, for example, is justified
through the opposition of purity and pollution, with Brahmins seen as most superior
and Dalits as most inferior by birth. Typically, people with the greatest privilege
defend such systems most strongly, while those at the bottom of the hierarchy are
most likely to challenge them.

Q. How would you distinguish prejudice from other kinds of opinion or
belief?

Answer: Prejudice is a pre-conceived opinion or attitude held by members
of one group towards another. What sets it apart from an ordinary opinion or belief
is that it is formed before any familiarity with the subject and before
considering any actual evidence; it is literally a “pre-judgement”. An ordinary
opinion can change when new facts appear, but a prejudiced person’s views are
resistant to change even in the face of new information, because the opinion is
often based on hearsay rather than on direct evidence. Prejudice can be positive or negative:
though usually used for negative pre-judgements, a person can also be prejudiced in
favour of their own caste or group without any evidence that it is actually
superior. Prejudice is also often grounded in stereotypes, fixed and inflexible
characterisations of a whole group, such as colonial labels calling some Indian
communities “martial races”, others “effeminate” or “cowardly”, and yet others
“untrustworthy”, which refuse to recognise how individuals actually vary.

Q. What is social exclusion?

Answer: Social exclusion refers to the ways in which individuals become
cut off from full involvement in the wider society. It covers a broad range of
factors that prevent individuals or groups from having the opportunities open to
the majority of the population. To live a full and active life, a person needs not
only food, clothing and housing, but also access to education, health,
transportation, insurance, social security, banking, and even the police or the
judiciary. Social exclusion is not accidental but systematic: it results
from the structural features of society rather than from random chance. The
chapter adds that prejudices remain and new ones often emerge, so legislation
alone is unable to transform society; a constant social campaign to change
awareness and sensitivity is also required.

Q. What is the relationship between caste and economic inequality today?

Answer: Historically, caste and economic status tended to coincide
closely: “high” castes were almost invariably of high economic status and “low”
castes almost always of low economic status. In modern times, especially since the
nineteenth century, the link between caste and occupation has become much less
rigid: it is now easier to change one’s occupation, and compared to a hundred or
fifty years ago the correlation between caste and economic status is also weaker,
so rich and poor people are found in every caste today.
However, at the macro (national) level, the caste-class correlation remains
remarkably stable. The privileged, high-income sections of society continue to be
overwhelmingly drawn from “upper” castes, while the disadvantaged, low-income
sections continue to be dominated by “lower” castes. The book’s Table 1 (poverty, 2011-12)
shows this: 45.3% of Scheduled Tribes and 31.5% of Scheduled Castes in rural India
lived below the poverty line, against 15.5% of Forward Castes. Table 2 (affluence,
1999-2000) shows the same pattern: in rural India the Scheduled Tribes (1.4%) and
Scheduled Castes (1.7%) have the smallest affluent populations, and in urban India
the Scheduled Castes (0.8%) do. (Sources printed under Table 1: NITI Aayog, 2014;
Panagariya and More, 2013.) So while individual mobility has
increased, caste continues to affect the life chances of Indians as a group in the
twenty-first century.

Q. What is untouchability?

Answer: Untouchability is an extreme and particularly vicious aspect of
the caste system that prescribes stringent social sanctions against members of
castes located at the bottom of the purity-pollution scale. So-called
“untouchable” castes are treated as outside the caste hierarchy altogether,
considered so impure that their mere touch, or in some regions (particularly the
south) even their presence or shadow (“distance pollution”), is believed to
pollute members of other castes. The institution has three equally important
dimensions: exclusion (for example, being barred from sharing drinking
water sources or joining collective worship and festivals), humiliation-
subordination, and exploitation (almost always through forced, unpaid
or under-paid labour, or confiscation of property). It is a pan-Indian phenomenon,
though its exact form and intensity vary from region to region.

Q. Describe some of the policies designed to address caste inequality.

Answer: The most important state policy is reservation: seats set
aside for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in the State and Central
legislatures (State Assemblies, Lok Sabha, Rajya Sabha), in government jobs across
all departments and public-sector companies, and in educational institutions, in
proportion to their share of the total population; for the OBCs this proportion is
decided differently. Since the early 1990s, special programmes have also been
extended to the Other Backward Classes.
Alongside reservation, a number of laws have been passed to end, prohibit and punish caste
discrimination: the
Caste Disabilities Removal Act (1850), which stopped the curtailment of a
citizen’s rights due solely to a change of religion or caste, and was used to
allow Dalits entry to government schools; the Constitution of
India (1950), whose Article 17 abolished untouchability outright; the
Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act (1989),
which strengthened punishment for violence or humiliation against Dalits and
adivasis; and the Constitution (93rd Amendment) Act, which became law on 23
January 2006 and introduced OBC reservation in higher education. The fact that
legislation was passed repeatedly on this subject is itself proof that the law alone cannot end a deeply rooted social
practice; a constant social campaign is also needed alongside it.

Q. How are the Other Backward Castes different from the Dalits (or
Scheduled Castes)?

Answer: Dalits (ex-untouchable castes) suffered the single most extreme
and comprehensive form of discrimination, untouchability, including exclusion from
shared resources and collective life. The Other Backward Classes (OBCs) are made
up of the service and artisanal castes who occupied the lower rungs of the caste
hierarchy and faced discrimination, but of a lesser degree, short of
untouchability. OBCs are defined negatively, as neither “forward” castes
nor Dalits, and since caste has entered other Indian religions besides Hinduism,
OBCs also include backward-caste members of other religions with similar
socio-economic status. This makes OBCs a much more diverse group than
Dalits or adivasis. OBCs are also internally split between “upper” OBCs, largely
landed castes dominant in rural society, and “lower” OBCs, who are very poor and
often not very different from Dalits in socio-economic terms. Finally, the OBC issue reached national politics much later
than the Dalit movement, becoming major only after the Mandal Commission report
was implemented in 1990.

Q. What are the major issues of concern to adivasis today?

Answer: The central issue is the loss of forests and land. From the late
nineteenth century, the colonial government reserved most forest tracts for its
own use, cutting off adivasi rights to gather forest produce and practise shifting
cultivation, so that adivasis denied access were forced to either use forests
illegally (and be harassed and prosecuted as “encroachers” and thieves) or
migrate for wage labour. This
pattern continued after Independence: capital-intensive industrialisation required
minerals and power concentrated in Adivasi areas, so adivasi lands were rapidly
acquired for mining and dam projects such as the Sardar Sarovar Dam (on the
Narmada) and the Polavaram Dam (on the Godavari), displacing hundreds of
thousands of adivasis without appropriate compensation or rehabilitation, a
process the chapter calls a form of “internal colonialism”, subjugating adivasis
and alienating the resources they depended on. This process has intensified
further since the 1990s, as economic liberalisation has made it easier for
corporate firms to acquire adivasi land. Adivasis continue to organise against
such outsiders, whom they call “dikus”, and against the state; among their most
significant achievements is separate statehood for Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh,
made possible because, unlike Dalits, they were concentrated in
contiguous areas.

Q. What are the major issues taken up by the women’s movement over its
history?

Answer: In the nineteenth century, middle-class social reform movements
focused on the backward aspects of tradition: Raja Rammohun Roy’s anti-sati
campaign in Bengal, M.G. Ranade’s widow remarriage movement in the Bombay
Presidency, and reformers like Jyotiba Phule and Sir Syed Ahmed Khan who linked
women’s issues to caste reform or to women’s education. This period also produced
women’s own voices, such as Tarabai Shinde’s Stree Purush Tulana (1882) and
Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream (1905). In the early twentieth century, a large number of women’s organisations arose
at both the all-India and local levels, and women took part in the national
movement itself. Women’s rights were part and parcel of the nationalist vision: the 1931 Karachi Session of the
Indian National Congress declared its commitment to women’s equality before the
law, no disability on grounds of sex in public employment, office or any trade
or calling, universal adult
suffrage, and women’s right to vote and hold public office. Two decades after
Independence, the 1970s shifted attention to “modern” issues: the representation
of women in popular media and the gendered consequences of unequal development.
The 1980s made law a major site of reform, once it was discovered that many
laws affecting women had not changed since the nineteenth century. In the
twenty-first century, the declining sex ratio, especially the sharp fall in the
child sex ratio and the social bias against the girl child, has emerged as one of
the new challenges of gender inequality.

Q. In what sense can one say that ‘disability’ is as much a social as a
physical thing?

Answer: The differently abled are not “disabled” only because of a
physical or mental impairment; they are also disabled because society itself is
built in a way that does not cater to their needs. As Brisenden (1986) puts it,
“we are disabled by buildings that are not designed to admit us, and this in turn
leads to a range of further disablements regarding our education, our chances of
gaining employment, our social lives and so on. The disablement lies in the
construction of society, not in the physical condition of the individual.” The
disabled are rendered disabled not because they are biologically disabled but
because society renders them so. Public perception reinforces this: disability
is widely understood as a biological given, and the disabled person is seen as a
“victim” (labels like bechara accentuate this); the common perception views
disability as retribution for past karma from which there can be no reprieve, so
the dominant cultural view treats it as essentially a characteristic of the
individual. For example (our own illustration, not the book’s), a person who
cannot walk is disabled mainly by a building with no ramp, and a person who
cannot hear by a school or workplace that makes no provision for them. Disability is also linked to
poverty in a two-way, social relationship: poverty (through malnutrition, poor
immunisation, overcrowded and unsafe homes) increases the incidence of
disability, and disability in turn deepens poverty through isolation and economic
strain on the whole family. All of this shows that while an impairment is a
physical fact, whether and how far it becomes a “disability” depends heavily on
how society is built and how it chooses to treat the person who has it.

Q. Identify some of the richest and some of the poorest people in your neighbourhood, people that you or your family are acquainted with. Try to talk to one person from each group to find out about their daily routines. For each person, organise the information in the form of an imaginary diary detailing the activities of the person from the time they get up to the time they go to sleep on a typical (or average) working day. Based on these diaries, try to answer the following questions and discuss them with your classmates.
How many hours a day do each of these persons spend at work? What kind of work do they do, in what ways is their work tiring, stressful, pleasant or unpleasant? What kinds of relationship does it involve with other people: do they have to take orders, give orders, seek cooperation, enforce discipline? Are they treated with respect by the people they have to deal with in their work, or do they themselves have to show respect for others?
If the person has no real ‘job’ or is currently ‘not working’: Why is the person ‘unemployed’? Has he/she been looking for work? How is he/she supporting herself/himself? In what ways are they affected by the fact of not having any work? Is their lifestyle any different from when they were working?

Answer: Write the two diaries hour by hour, then compare them point by point: hours of work, how physically tiring or stressful the work is, whether the person gives orders or takes them, and whether they receive respect or must show it. You may find what the chapter points out: back-breaking work is done by the poor, such as a rickshaw-puller, porter or domestic worker, who may take orders and have to show respect, and yet rarely improve their life chances, while the richer person may have more control over their own time and over others; check this against your diaries. If the person has no job, answer from their own account: why they are not working, whether they have been looking for work, how they support themselves, how the lack of work affects them, and whether their lifestyle has changed from when they worked. This is the point of the activity: it makes you rethink the commonsense view that hard work alone can improve an individual’s life chances. Hard work and ability do matter, but all other things are not equal, and it is these group differences that explain social inequality and exclusion.

Q. Collect examples of prejudiced behaviour from films or novels. Discuss the examples you and your classmates have gathered. How are prejudices reflected in the manner a social group is depicted? How do we decide whether a certain kind of portrayal is prejudiced or not? Can you distinguish between instances of prejudice that were intentional, i.e., the film maker or writer wanted to show it as prejudiced, and unintentional or unconscious prejudice?

Answer: Choose examples where a whole community, caste, gender or region is shown in one fixed way. Use the chapter’s definitions to judge them. A portrayal is prejudiced when it shows a pre-judgement, an opinion formed without evidence, about a group, and it usually rests on a stereotype: a fixed and inflexible characterisation that treats an entire community as though it were a single person with a single trait, such as calling a whole group ‘lazy’ or ‘cunning’. It is not prejudiced when characters are shown as individuals who vary. Prejudice is intentional when the film maker or writer shows a character holding a prejudice in order to criticise it; it is unintentional or unconscious when the story itself repeats the stereotype as if it were true, without questioning it.

Table 1 gives the percentage of each caste/community group living below the poverty line in 2011-12; Table 2 gives the percentage living in affluence in 1999-2000 (a monthly spending of Rs 1000 or more per person in rural India and Rs 2000 or more in urban India). The answers below are read directly from the two tables.

Q1. What is the percentage of the Indian population that was living below the poverty line in (a) Rural India and (b) Urban India?
Answer: (a) 25.4% in rural India; (b) 13.7% in urban India (the ‘All Groups’ row of Table 1).

Q2. Which caste/community group has the highest proportion of its members living in extreme poverty in a) rural and b) urban India? Which caste/community has the lowest percentage of population living in poverty?
Answer: The Scheduled Tribes, in both: 45.3% in rural India and 24.1% in urban India. The Sikhs have the lowest percentage living in poverty: 6.2% in rural India and 5.0% in urban India.

Q3. Approximately how many times higher than the national average is the poverty percentage for each of the lower castes (ST, SC, OBC)? Is there a significant rural-urban difference?
Answer: Rural India (average 25.4%): ST 45.3%, about 1.8 times the average; SC 31.5%, about 1.2 times; OBC 22.7%, slightly below the average (about 0.9 times). Urban India (average 13.7%): ST 24.1%, about 1.8 times; SC 21.7%, about 1.6 times; OBC 15.4%, about 1.1 times. Yes, there is a difference: poverty is lower in towns for every group (note that Table 1 uses a different poverty line for each area, Rs 816 rural and Rs 1000 urban), but compared with the average, the SCs and OBCs are worse placed in urban India than in rural India, while the STs are about 1.8 times the average in both.

Q4. Which caste/community has the lowest percentage of population living in affluence in rural and urban India respectively? How does this compare with the national average?
Answer: Rural India: the Scheduled Tribes, only 1.4% affluent against a national average of 4.3%, about one-third of the average. Urban India: the Scheduled Castes, only 0.8% affluent against a national average of 4.5%, less than one-fifth of the average.

Q5. The affluent population of ‘Upper’ caste Hindus is roughly how many times larger than the percentage for the ‘lower’ castes (ST, SC, OBC)?
Answer: Table 2 has no row named ‘upper caste’. The row to read is ‘Hindu’ (8.6% rural, 8.2% urban): the ST, SC and OBC rows are listed separately, so the question treats this row as the ‘upper’ caste Hindus. Rural India: about 6 times the ST figure (1.4%), about 5 times the SC figure (1.7%) and about 2.6 times the OBC figure (3.3%). Urban India: about 4.5 times the ST figure (1.8%), about 10 times the SC figure (0.8%) and about 4 times the OBC figure (2.0%).

Q6. What do these tables tell you about the relative position of the OBCs? Is there a significant rural-urban difference?
Answer: The OBCs are better off than the SCs and STs but well behind the ‘upper’ castes. In rural India their poverty rate (22.7%) is a little below the national average (25.4%), but in urban India it is above it (15.4% against 13.7%); their affluence is below the average in both, and in towns (2.0% against 4.5%) it is less than half. So yes, there is a significant rural-urban difference: urban OBCs are relatively worse off. This matches the chapter’s point that the situation of urban OBCs is much worse, being much closer to that of the Scheduled Castes and Tribes than to the upper castes.

Q. Obtain a copy of the Constitution of India. You can get it from your school library, from a bookshop, or from the Internet (web address: http://indiacode.nic.in/). Find and list all the articles and sections (laws) that deal with the Scheduled Castes and Tribes, or with caste-related problems like Untouchability. You can make a chart of the most important laws and put them up in your class.

Answer: Make a two-column chart: the article or law, and what it does. Begin with the provisions and laws this chapter itself names: Article 17 of the Constitution (1950), which abolished untouchability; the reservation provisions of the Constitution for seats in the State and Central legislatures, jobs in government service and public sector companies, and seats in educational institutions; the Caste Disabilities Removal Act of 1850; the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act of 1989, which strengthened punishment for acts of violence or humiliation against Dalits and adivasis; and the Constitution (Ninety Third Amendment) Act of 2005, which became law on 23 January 2006 and introduced reservation for the OBCs in institutions of higher education. Then add the other articles you find in your copy of the Constitution. Note on the chart the chapter’s lesson: the fact that legislation was passed repeatedly on this subject shows that the law alone cannot end a social practice.

Q. Find out about a social reformer in your part of the country. Collect information about her/him. Read an autobiography/biography of any social reformer. Can you see any of the ideas they fought for existing today in our everyday lives or in our constitutional provisions?

Answer: Choose a reformer from your region and note their dates, the evils they fought and the methods they used. The chapter’s own examples show what to look for: Raja Rammohun Roy’s campaign against sati in Bengal, M.G. Ranade’s work for widow remarriage in the Bombay Presidency, Jyotiba Phule’s attack on both caste and gender discrimination through the Satyashodak Samaj, and Sir Syed Ahmed Khan’s reform of Muslim society and support for girls’ education, though within the precincts of their homes and with a separate curriculum. Many of their ideas are reflected in later constitutional provisions, such as the abolition of untouchability (Article 17). The 1931 Karachi Session of the Congress had already declared equality before the law ‘irrespective of religion, caste, creed or sex’, and women’s right to vote and hold public office. Link your reformer’s ideas to such provisions and to everyday life, for example girls going to school.

Q. Make a list of professions in which women are involved today. Can you think of any educational field where women are barred today? Perhaps the discussion on women in the Indian armed forces may throw some light on this.

Answer: Your list can include teaching, medicine and nursing, law and the judiciary, engineering and science, the civil services and police, banking, business, journalism, farming, politics and the armed forces. For the second part, look for fields and roles where women still face restrictions or have been admitted only recently, and the debate about women’s entry into different branches and roles of the armed forces is the example the book suggests. Connect this to the chapter’s argument: once rights such as education for women were accepted, it started a process that finally made it impossible to confine women to only some kinds of education, and the chapter says there are no biological reasons that can explain why so few women are found in positions of public power.

Q. Find out the names of a few women’s organisations that emerged both at the national level and in your part of the country. Find out about any woman who was part of a tribal or peasant movement, a trade union or one of the many strands of the freedom movement. Identify a novel, a short story or play in your region which depicted the struggle of women against discrimination.

Answer: This is a research activity; your answer will come from your library, your teacher and your region’s history and literature. The chapter tells you where to look: a large number of women’s organisations arose at both the all-India and local levels in the early twentieth century, and women then took part in the national movement itself. The chapter’s own examples of women writing against discrimination are Tarabai Shinde’s Stree Purush Tulana (1882), a protest against the double standards of a male dominated society, and Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream (1905). Use them as models for the kind of work you are looking for in your own language and region.

Q. Divide your class into groups. Each group can choose a topic relating to women’s rights on which they must collect information from newspapers, radio, television news or other source. Discuss your findings with your classmates. Possible examples of topics could be: 33 per cent reservation for women in elected bodies; domestic violence; right to employment; there are many other topics of interest, choose the ones which interest you.

Answer: Each group should collect a few news reports on its topic, note the facts, the laws or policies involved and the different views people hold, and present a short summary to the class. Place your topic in the chapter’s history of the women’s movement: in the nineteenth century the focus was on sati, child marriage and the ill treatment of widows; in the 1970s it moved to ‘modern’ issues such as the representation of women in popular media and the gendered consequences of unequal development; from the 1980s the law became a major site for reform; and today the sharp fall in the child sex ratio and the bias against the girl child are among the new challenges.

Q. Find out how different traditional or mythical stories depict the disabled. You can draw from any of the innumerable regional sources of folklore, mythology, and traditional storytelling in India, or from any other part of the world. Make a list of examples that show positive achievements of the disabled in different fields like music, art, etc.

Answer: Collect a few stories and note how the disabled character is shown. The chapter says that the popular images in mythology portray the disabled in an extremely negative fashion: disability is often shown as the result of fate or as retribution for past karma, and the disabled person as a victim, a ‘bechara’. For the second list, note people with disabilities who have achieved success in music, art, sport, writing and other fields; the film Iqbal (Activity 5.9) is one example the book itself gives. Your two lists together show the chapter’s point: the negative image comes from society’s view of disability, not from what disabled people are capable of.

Q. Have you seen the film, Iqbal? If you have not, do try and see it. It is an exemplary story of the grit and determination of a young boy who cannot hear and speak but has a passion for cricket, and finally, excels as a bowler. The film brings alive not just Iqbal’s struggles but also the many possible concrete meanings of the phrase ‘differently abled’.

Answer: After watching the film, note what makes Iqbal’s journey hard: whether it is his inability to hear and speak, or the doubts, lack of opportunity and attitudes of the people around him. This is exactly the chapter’s argument that the disabled are rendered disabled not because they are biologically disabled but because society renders them so. Iqbal’s success as a bowler shows the meaning of ‘differently abled’: he has a different set of abilities, not an absence of ability.

Q. Read the quote above (Box 5.7, from Anita Ghai) and discuss the different ways in which the problems of the disabled are socially constituted.

Answer: Box 5.7 shows that the problems of the disabled are created by social conditions, not by impairment alone. First, in a country where half the children aged 5-14 are out of school, there is little space for children with disabilities, especially if segregated schooling is advocated for them. Second, even when the law tries to make education available to every disabled child, parents in a village do not see it as a route to autonomy for their child; they would prefer a better way of fetching water and improved agricultural facilities. Third, parents in an urban slum want education that is related to a world of work that would improve their child’s basic quality of life. So poverty, the design of the school system and the kind of opportunities society offers all shape what disability means, which supports the chapter’s view that disability is as much a social as a physical thing.