Dalits breaking the caste shackles with enterprise
Lydia Polgreen and Hari Kumar, The New York Times
Recent rapid economic growth in India has given them a chance to
overcome the old barriers
At school, he took his place on the floor in a portion of the
classroom built one step lower than the rest.
Untouchables like him, considered to be spiritually and physically
unclean, could not be permitted to pollute their upper-caste
neighbours and classmates.
But on a recent afternoon, as Khade's chauffeur guided his shimmering
silver BMW sedan onto that same street in a village in Maharashtra,
village leaders rushed to greet him. He paid his respects at the
temple, which he paid to rebuild. The untouchable boy had become
golden, thanks to the newest god in the Indian pantheon: money.
As the founder of a successful offshore oil-rig engineering firm,
Khade is part of a tiny but growing class of millionaires from the
Dalit population, the 200 million people who occupy the very lowest
rung in Hinduism's social hierarchy. "I've gone from village to
palace," Khade exclaimed, using his favourite phrase to describe his
remarkable journey from the son of an illiterate cobbler in the 1960s
to a wealthy business partner of Arab sheiks.
The rapid growth that followed the opening of the Indian economy in
1991 has widened the gulf between rich and poor, and some here have
begun to blame liberalisation for the rising tide of corruption. But
the era of growth has also created something unthinkable a generation
ago: a tiny but growing group of wealthy Dalit businesspeople. Some
measure their fortunes in hundreds of thousands of dollars, and a
handful, like Khade, have started companies worth tens of millions.
With their newfound wealth, they have also won a measure of social
acceptance.
"This is a golden period for Dalits," said Chandra Bhan Prasad, a
Dalit activist and researcher who has championed capitalism among the
Dalits. "Because of the new market economy, material markers are
replacing social markers. Dalits can buy rank in the market economy.
India is moving from a caste-based to a class-based society, where if
you have all the goodies in life and your bank account is booming, you
are acceptable."
Milind Kamble, a Dalit contractor based in the city of Pune in
Maharashtra State, said that out of the 100 or so members of the Dalit
Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry in his city, only one was in
business before 1931. "We are fighting the caste system with
capitalism," he said.
The Dalits still lag behind the rest of India, but they have
experienced gains as the country's economy has expanded. A recent
analysis of government survey data by economists at the University of
British Columbia found that the wage premium non-Dalits get has
decreased to 21 per cent, down from 36 per cent in 1983, less than the
gap between white male and black male workers in the United States.
The education gap has been halved.
Another survey conducted by Indian researchers along with professors
from the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard showed that the social
status of Dalits had risen as well—they are more likely to be invited
to non-Dalit weddings, to eat the same foods and wear the same clothes
as upper-caste people, and use grooming products like shampoo and
bottled hair oil.
Knowledge-based businesses like information technology have attracted
large numbers of Brahmins, the traditional learned caste. The
business castes tended to focus more on retail and wholesale trade
than manufacturing. Messy industries like construction are closer to
the traditional occupations of the lowest castes.
One Dalit businessman in Pune has turned the traditionally undesirable
work of pest control in to a million-dollar company. Kamble made his
fortune in India's building boom. Dalits have started small technology
companies, installing networking equipment, while others have set up
factories to make water pipes and sugar. "In this complex society,
Dalits are turning disadvantage into an advantage," Prasad said.
Ashok Khade's rags-to-riches story stands out because of how
completely he transformed himself, with some luck and some help from
India's opening economy, from an illiterate cobbler's son to a
multimillionaire player in the booming oil services industry. He was
born in a mud hut in Fed in 1955, one of six children.
His parents were day labourers who toiled in upper-caste farmers'
fields for pennies. His father would often travel to Mumbai, then
known as Bombay, to work as a shoe repairman. He came from a family of
Chamhars, a subcaste at the very bottom of the Hindu hierarchy. Their
traditional job was to skin dead animals.
Few pennies
All through schooling, Ashok Khade endured extreme poverty. Students
had to provide their own paper to write their exams, and one day he
found himself without even a few pennies to buy the necessary sheets
of foolscap.
A teacher tore pages from the attendance ledger. Too poor to buy
string to tie the pages together, he used a thorn from a tree. None of
it mattered. He graduated near the top of his class. Khade's elder
brother, Datta, had managed to get an apprenticeship as a welder at a
government-owned ship building company, Mazagon Dock, in Mumbai. He
persuaded young Ashok to move to the big city. The tiny room where
Datta lived with relatives was already full, so Ashok slept for a time
under a nearby staircase on a folding cot.
Khade dreamed of becoming a doctor and studied at a local college. But
Datta. who supported the entire family, begged his younger brother to
drop out of school and start working. Datta helped Ashok get a job as
an apprentice draftsman at Mazagon Dock. What seemed like a setback
turned out to be a stroke of luck. His flawless drafting skills and
boundless appetite for hard work won him promotions. In 1983, he was
sent to Germany to work on a submarine project.
One day he happened to see the pay slip of one of his German
colleagues. He earned in one month more than Khade earned in a year.
"I thought about my family's needs," he said. "My sisters needed to
get married. I knew I could do better than working for someone else."
When he returned from Germany he began laying the groundwork to start
his own company. The risk was enormous, and it was almost unheard of
to leave a steady job to start a company. But his two brothers were
expert off-shore welders. They had good contacts from their many years
at Mazagon Dock.
And India''s economy was changing after years of stagnation as the
1991 reforms began to reduce the socialist bureaucracy's control of
the economy and stimulate growth. The brothers used their savings to
finance the small subcontract jobs they began with, and in 1993 they
got their first big order, for some underwater jackets for an offshore
oil rig, from Mazagon Dock.
Faster growth
Khade's hunch was right, and his timing was impeccable. Faster growth
meant India's appetite for fossil fuels grew ever more rapacious. His
company, which builds and refurbishes offshore oil rigs, has expanded
rapidly, and he is currently expanding beyond India to the Middle
East. He recently signed a deal with a member of the royal family of
Abu Dhabi to work on oil wells there, and he is building what will be
India's biggest jetty fabrication yard on the Maharashtra coast, 14
hours by ship from Dubai. He currently has 4,500 employees, and his
company is valued at more than $100 million.
Khade probably would not be in business with a prince had he not
attended a networking cocktail reception hosted by the Dalit Chamber
of Commerce and Industry at the five-star Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai
earlier this year. There he met the Indian businessman who introduced
him to the Arab sheik, who helped him to globalize his company.
These kinds of connections are crucial to the nascent Dalit business
community. Because Dalit businessmen often lack the social connections
that lead to business ideas, loans and other support, a group of Dalit
entrepreneurs created the chamber in 2005. It aims to build those
networks so Dalit business leaders can help one another grow. The
group has about 1,000 members, all of whom run companies with an
annual turnover of at least 1 million rupees. It recently organised a
meeting where Dalit businessmen pitched ideas to Tata Motors, one of
India's biggest car companies. Kamble, who attended the meeting, said
that of the 10 companies that attended, 4 had signed deals and 4 more
were in negotiations.
"There was a time when people like us could not even approach a
company like Tata Motors," Kamble said. "Now we go meet them with
dignity, not like beggars. We are job givers, not job seekers."
The group has persuaded the government to embrace contracting
preferences for Dalits like the ones that have helped businesses owned
by women and minorities in the United States. It also seeks to
persuade private companies to embrace affirmative action policies that
would create more jobs and business opportunities for Dalits.
Despite gains for some Dalits, a recent paper from the Harvard
Business School on caste and entrepreneurship that used government
data from 2005 found that, even after the liberalization of the
economy, Dalits were "significantly under-represented in the ownership
of private enterprises, and the employment generated by private
enterprises."
Even for those who have had wild success in business, social
acceptance has proved harder to attain. While wealth insulates them to
some degree from lingering caste prejudice, barriers remain even for
rich Dalits.
Even Khade, with all his wealth and newfound status, does not want to
offend potential upper-caste clients. His business card reads Ashok K,
leaving off the last name that reveals what he is: a Dalit.
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