The New Frontier

Merit vs. Caste in the Indian IT Sector

Does the burgeoning Indian Information Technology (IT) sector represent a deviation from the historical arc of caste inequality or has it become yet another site of discrimination? Those who claim that the sector is caste-free believe that IT is an equal opportunity employer, and that the small Dalit footprint is due to the want of merit. But they fail to consider how caste inequality sneaks in by being layered on socially constructed ‘pure merit’, which favours upper castes and other privileged segments, but handicaps Dalits and other disadvantaged groups. In this book, Fernandez describes how the practice of pure and holistic merit are deeply embedded in the social, cultural, and economic privileges of the dominant castes and classes, and how caste filtering has led to the reproduction of caste hierarchies and consequently the small Dalit footprint in Indian IT.