BANGALORE, INDIA, October 4, 2007: India’s government is threatening to make companies hire more low-caste workers. A 23-year-old dressed in white pajama trousers and a black over shirt represents two worlds in India that know almost nothing of each other. One is fast growing but tiny: the world of business. Strolling through the Californian-style campus in Bangalore that serves as the headquarters of Infosys, a computer-services company, she grins and declares herself glad. Her brother, she adds, is so proud that she is an “infoscion.”
He is in the rural world where 70% of Indians reside: cultivating the family plot in Bannahalli Hundi, a village near Mysore. Life is less delightful there. Half the 4,000 population are Brahmins, of the Hindu priestly caste. The rest, including the software engineer and family, are Dalits, members of a “scheduled caste” that was once considered untouchable. Sixty years on this is still the case in Bannahalli Hundi, says the young woman who does not want to be named. She has never entered the house of a Brahmin neighbor. Has there been no weakening of caste strictures in her lifetime? “I have not seen it,” she says.
The tale is in startling contrast to Infosys’s modernity. But it partly explains how she came to be hired by a company that is considered to be one of India’s best. She is the beneficiary of a charitable training scheme for Dalit university-leavers that Infosys launched last year. In collaboration with the elite Bangalore-based International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Infosys is providing special training to low-caste engineering graduates who have failed to get a job in its industry. The training, which lasts seven months, does not promise employment. But of the 89 who completed the first course in May, all but four have found jobs. Infosys hired 17.
The charity was born of a threat. India’s Congress-led government has told companies to hire more Dalits and members of tribal communities. Together these groups represent around a quarter of India’s population and half of its poor. Manmohan Singh, the prime minister, has given warning that “strong measures” will be taken if companies do not comply. Many interpret that to mean the government will impose caste-based hiring quotas. Quotas already apply in education and government, where since 1950 22.3% of university places and government jobs have been reserved for Dalits and tribal people.
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