India tells itself a comforting story – that caste was a village issue, a feudal remnant, a dying way of life, a thing that passed away road by road as people got degrees and went to the cities, now they swipe on matrimonial apps rather than asking the family priest.

The facts tell a different story.

Caste is not the result of the introduction of malls and metros in India. It went inside, into panels of people to hire, WhatsApp groups, housing societies, marriage filters, where you can’t see it so it’s easy to deny. This piece is not an accusation against any one community. This hierarchy is a part of every major religion in India. It’s not about who is at fault. The point is a system this old doesn’t disappear when a country modernises its skyline. All it does is change its address.

The ugly duckling among the marriages

It all begins with the fact that survives every dinner-table argument. The India Human Development Survey (NCAER/University of Maryland) directly questioned married women about caste marriage; it surveyed more than 42,000 households. Only 5.4% responded positively, and this was virtually the same as 10 years ago when this survey was last conducted.

None of the economic liberalisation, the IT boom or 20 years of English medium education got the ball moving. Inter-caste marriage had least prevalence in Madhya Pradesh (less than 1%) but the highest in Gujarat and Bihar (just over 11%).

30% of rural and 20% of urban households said they practised untouchability. Caste is the most self-disclosing in marriage. A person can say that they are caste blind in the workplace, at college, on social media, etc. However, a matrimonial profile has a searchable caste and sub-caste field like the searchable height and complexion fields. In fact, even the most progressive families keep the filter box closed while they are about to open the resume. And this is not simply about parents controlling children.

When conducted throughout Delhi and UP, surveys revealed something less agreeable: The ‘inter-caste marriage ban’ was not limited to the old or the rural. But roughly 40% of the respondents in Delhi and more than 60% in rural Uttar Pradesh indicated that such laws should exist, and greater than 75% of both Hindus and Muslims in Uttar Pradesh expressed opposition to inter-religious marriage.

What was most telling, however, was that this finding was found to be inconsistent regarding education. For some readings, it was the one most strongly correlated with a desire for such laws.

Untouchability is not a museum word

The word sounds archaic, something from a Gandhi-era pamphlet. It is not. The same IHDS survey found that 27% of Indian households openly admitted to practising some form of untouchability, with the figure at 30% in rural India and 20% in urban India. Note the word “openly.” Researchers who study this assume real numbers are higher, because admitting it to a stranger with a clipboard is socially uncomfortable.

What breaks the comforting narrative further is who admits to it. Across caste groups, 52% of Brahmin respondents and 24% of other forward-caste respondents admitted to the practice, compared with 33% among OBC respondents, 15% among Scheduled Castes, and 22% among Scheduled Tribes. Untouchability is not confined to remote villages or to any single caste bracket. It runs across the social ladder, just with different intensity at different rungs.

And income does not buy an exit either. The gap in untouchability practice between the poorest and richest households was only about 2 percentage points in rural India and 1 point in urban India. What did move the number, interestingly, was education, but only partially. Among Brahmin households, moving from a primary-school education to a graduate degree cut the practice by 24% points, and state-level spending on education tracked similarly, with low-spending Bihar showing roughly 1 in 2 households admitting the practice against roughly 1 in 50 in higher-spending Kerala. Education helps. It does not erase.

The [quiet] ‘gatekeeping’ of the modern economy

This is the part urban, educated India finds hardest to accept: caste did not stay behind in the fields. It walked into the office.

A well-known audit study of India’s private sector job market sent out matched resumes that differed only in the caste-signalling surname attached to them. On average, applicants with low-caste surnames had to send 20% more resumes than applicants with high-caste surnames just to get the same number of callbacks, and the gap widened further when the recruiter on the other end was male or Hindu. Nobody in that hiring process would describe themselves as casteist. The bias showed up before anyone even met a candidate, in the fraction of a second it takes to glance at a name.

A separate field experiment focused on Delhi’s newer, supposedly meritocratic sectors, software and call centres, and found the picture was uneven rather than absent. There was no measurable discrimination against lower-caste applicants for software roles, but there were large, significant gaps against Other Backward Castes, and to a lesser extent Scheduled Castes, specifically for call-centre jobs. The newest parts of the economy are not automatically the most neutral. They simply hide the sorting differently, through college pedigree, accent, “cultural fit,” soft skills, all proxies that map suspiciously well onto old hierarchies of privilege.

This is the mechanism educated India keeps missing. Nobody needs to say the word caste out loud for caste to keep doing its work. A closed circle of alumni referrals, a founder who “just vibes” with people from a similar background, a gated community that quietly prices out certain surnames, these all function as caste filters without ever naming caste. The absence of the word is mistaken for the absence of the practice.

When it turns violent?

Caste in India is not only about exclusion. It is also, routinely, about violence, and the numbers are moving in the wrong direction. NCRB’s Crime in India report for 2022 recorded 57,582 cases registered as crimes against Scheduled Castes, a 13.1% rise over the previous year, alongside 10,064 cases against Scheduled Tribes, up 14.3%, including 1,347 reported rapes and 1,022 assaults on tribal women. The following year was worse for tribal communities specifically. Crimes against Scheduled Tribes rose a further 28.8% in 2023 to 12,960 cases, with Manipur, driven by ethnic conflict, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan the worst affected.

What compounds the injury is what happens after the case is filed. Look at state-level trial data from Haryana in 2023: of 352 completed trials under the law meant to punish atrocities against SCs, only 68 ended in conviction, a rate of just 19.3%. A law exists. Enforcement, mostly, does not. That gap between the statute book and the police station is where a great deal of caste violence quietly survives.

It is not a Hindu problem alone

Every major religion that took root in India inherited or reproduced some version of caste, including the ones that explicitly preach against it.

Among Indian Muslims, sociologists describe a three-tier structure: Ashraf, a foreign-origin group treated as socially dignified, and Ajlaf and Arzal, indigenous occupational groups that are not. The Ashraf category, despite making up only around 15% of the Muslim population, has historically held a disproportionate share of political, cultural, and educational capital, a pattern the Sachar Committee itself noted when it described Ashraf sections as facing no meaningful social disability, unlike the Pasmanda, or backward and Dalit, Muslims. Pasmanda Muslims, comprising the Ajlaf and Arzal groups, make up over 80% of the Muslim population yet remain caught in a persistent poverty trap even as the Ashraf elite shows mobility closer to that of upper-caste Hindus. Practices documented within this hierarchy include separate drinking vessels for lower-caste Muslims, separate rows in some mosques, and exclusion from certain burial grounds, with high-caste and Pasmanda Muslims rarely intermarrying

Among Indian Christians, the pattern is just as material. Separate churches, and in some places separate burial grounds, exist along caste lines, and Christian marriages themselves largely follow caste and sub-caste boundaries. Court cases on this are not hypothetical. As recently as 2025, India’s Supreme Court issued notice on a petition alleging that a parish in Tamil Nadu excluded Dalit Christians from festivities and assigned them segregated burial grounds.

Sikhism, whose founding texts explicitly reject caste, still shows caste behaviour on the ground. Jat Sikhs, a land-owning group, sit at the top of the social order, with converts from Hindu trading communities in the middle and Mazhabi Sikhs, descended from lower-caste converts, at the bottom. Marriage among Dalit Sikh sub-groups, such as Ramdasia, Ravidasia, and Mazhabi, still runs largely within community boundaries, and even these groups maintain an internal pecking order among themselves.

Jainism returned a number in the same IHDS survey that its own researchers flagged with caution because of small sample size but could not ignore: 35% of Jain respondents admitted to practising untouchability in some form, the highest share of any religious group surveyed, against 30% for Hindus, 23% for Sikhs, 18% for Muslims, and just 5% for Christians.

Even Buddhism, the faith millions of Dalits converted to specifically to escape caste following Dr B.R. Ambedkar, has not offered full escape. Buddhism as practised within India today comes closest to being casteless, though people carrying Dalit family histories, whether Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, or Sikh, continue to report prejudice from their newer co-religionists.

The lesson here is not that anyone community is worse. It is that caste in South Asia behaved less like a Hindu theological rule and more like a regional social operating system, one that got copied into every religion that grew here, regardless of what that religion’s own scripture said about equality.

Why educated India cannot see its own filter?

Ask an urban, English-speaking Indian professional whether caste shapes their life and most will say no, sincerely. They do not think in caste terms when they hire an assistant, choose a flatmate, or introduce their daughter to a friend’s son. And that is precisely the trick. Caste today rarely announces itself. It travels disguised as “cultural fit,” “the right networks,” “someone who gets it,” “a good family,” phrases that sound like class or taste but quietly encode caste.

This is also why the discomfort with the word is so strong. Bringing up caste in a dinner party in Bandra or Koramangala gets treated as bad manners, something only “unsophisticated” or “political” people talk about. But refusing to name a pattern does not remove the pattern. It only removes the ability to fix it.

The growth cost nobody puts in a policy paper

India spends enormous energy debating GDP growth, ease of doing business, and demographic dividend. Caste rarely enters that conversation, and it should, because a hiring market where a name changes your callback odds by 20% is a market misallocating talent on a national scale. A country cannot claim to be optimising for merit while a shadow variable, invisible on any org chart, is quietly deciding who gets referred, funded, and promoted.

Trust networks, the informal web of introductions, credit, and cooperation that every economy runs on beneath its formal institutions, remain heavily caste-shaped in India. When those networks stay closed, they do not just hurt the people locked out. They shrink the pool of ideas, founders, and workers the whole economy can draw from. A nation that wants to compete globally cannot afford to keep half its talent pool filtered at the door before the interview even starts.

Where this leaves us?

None of this is a call to shame any single group, caste, or religion. The data shows a pattern that runs through nearly every community in the country, in different shapes and different intensities. The honest starting point is simpler than an accusation: admit that the filter exists, admit that education and income have not been enough to dissolve it, and stop mistaking the absence of the word caste for the absence of its effect.

The question the carousel asked still stands.

Which box did your family tick first?

Most Indian families, if they are honest with themselves, already know the answer.

The harder question is what they plan to do about it?

Views of the author are personal and do not necessarily represent the website’s views.

Dr. Jaimine Vaishnav is a faculty of geopolitics and world economy and other liberal arts subjects, a researcher with publications in SCI and ABDC journals, and an author of 6 books specializing in informal economies, mass media, and street entrepreneurship. With over a decade of experience as an academic and options trader, he is keen on bridging the grassroots business practices with global economic thought. His work emphasizes resilience, innovation, and human action in everyday human life. He can be contacted on jaiminism@hotmail.co.in for further communication.

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