Sampling the corporate sector’s attitudes to hiring the disadvantaged, a recent study discovered huge holes in the myth of India Inc’s social inclusiveness.

The Sensex hit 20,000 points in early November, breaking all records. Corporate India is on the rise, and gloats unabashedly. An international collaborative study has revealed, however, that Corporate India would rather march on without offering Dalits and Muslims a share.

If you applied for an entry-level job in the corporate sector with a name like Ramdas Chamar or Mohan Paswan, and also sent a résumé as Badrinath Shrivastav or Sundaram Iyengar with the same set of credentials, the applications bearing the distinctly Dalit names (Chamar/Paswan) are less likely to get a response. Those with Muslim names tend to fare even worse. These are the findings of a two-year collaborative study undertaken by researchers at the Indian Institute of Dalit Studies (IIDS), headed by University Grants Commission chairman Sukhadeo Thorat, together with sociologists supported by Princeton University’s Institute for International and Regional Studies. Since October 2005, the multi-pronged study had sought to examine social exclusion in the urban Indian labour market. The findings, published in the form of four papers in Economic and Political Weekly, were deliberated upon recently in Delhi at a conference inaugurated by Union Human Resource Development minister Arjun Singh.

 The studies were conceived as “tests of the proposition that discrimination is no longer an issue in Indian labour markets, particularly in the formal, private sector”. Making use of techniques pioneered in the US to measure discrimi nation against blacks and other social minorities, the study has established conclusively that the private sector, left to its own devices, would unselfconsciously and prejudicially deny opportunities to Muslims and Dalits. The study establishes discrimination in quantitative terms, and identifies attitudes and beliefs through qualitative means that contribute to discriminatory pat terns of hiring.

 Formulated by Thorat and Paul Attewell of the City University of New York, the field experiment sought to verify name-related prejudices in Indian corporations. Over a period of 66 weeks, the research team made 4,808 applications for 548 openings, responding to entry level jobs advertised in national and regional English language newspapers, in cluding The Times of India, Hindustan Times, The Hindu, Deccan Herald and Deccan Chronicle. Applications were made to companies across the corporate sector, includ ing those in securities and investments, pharmaceuticals and medical sales, computer sales, support and IT services, manu facturing, accounting, automobile sales and financing, marketing and mass media, veterinary and agricul tural sales, construction and banking.

 IIDS research staff sub mitted sets of three matched application letters and résumés (in English) for each type of job, each application having identical educational qualifications and levels of experience. The matched applications differed only in the name of each male applicant. “No explicit mention of caste or religious background was made,” explains Thorat. “However, in each matched set, one application was for a person who had a stereotypically highcaste Hindu family name. The second was for an applicant with an identifiably Muslim name, and the third had a distinctively Dalit name.”

The authors of the study introduced a twist, adding one ‘discordant’ application to these three. “For jobs that required a higher degree, we sent in an additional applica tion from a person with a high-caste name who only had a bachelor’s degree. That is, an academically under-qualified person but from a socially highranking group. For jobs that required BA degrees, we added a person with a Dalit name who had a master’s degree, someone overqualified in academic terms but with a socially lower status.”

THERE WERE 450 positive outcomes, where employers either phoned or wrote to certain ‘applicants’ asking to interview the person. “We defined a positive outcome as simply entering the second stage of the job-search process: being contacted for an interview or for testing,” says Attewell. As the results proved, the odds of a Dalit being invited for an interview were about two-thirds of the odds of a high-caste applicant with the same qualifications. The odds of a Muslim applicant being called were worse: only one third as often as the high-caste Hindu counterpart. With the discordant applications, it was found that an under-qualified high-caste candidate had an edge over an overqualified Dalit or Muslim. Says Thorat: “This proves that social exclusion is not a residue of the past, nor is it merely a rural phenomenon. Caste and communal discrimination are prevalent in modern corporations.”

Thorat and Attewell say an empirical survey on the presence of Dalits and other minorities in the private sector was beyond the scope of this study given Indian industry’s wariness on this issue. “Companies in India are not obliged to report the caste and religious composition of their workforces to the government. US law, on the other hand, requires companies of a certain size to report the gender and racial composition of their workforces to the federal government, and these data are monitored by the Federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission,” says Attewell.

The private sector in India, largely unaccountable to any external or internal authority on social indices, may soon be forced to change its ways. The Centre is all set to establish an Equal Opportunity Commission (EOC). A five-member expert committee, likely to be headed by NR Madhava Menon, and including social scientists Javed Alam, Satish Deshpande and Yogendra Yadav, will decide on the contours of the proposed EOC. “It remains to be seen whether this Commission, when formed, will have teeth; and if it does, will they be used to bite,” says a skeptical A. Ramaiah, Chairperson, Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.

Another paper by Surinder Jodhka, sociologist with Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Katherine Newman of Princeton University, presented the results of a qualitative interview-based study of 25 human resource managers in large firms based in New Delhi and the National Capital Region. These firms have close to 20 lakh ‘core’ workers on their payroll. TEHELKA has learnt that the firms interviewed included heavyweights like ITC, Jet Airways, Maruti Udyog and Hero Honda. “Companies that scored high on the corporate social responsibility index were chosen,” Jodhka told TEHELKA. The study found that the HR managers spoke a new language of merit when describing hiring policies. “Worldliness, sophistication, and exposure to international issues were considered essential apart from scholastic record,” says Newman.

However, when pressed on whether qualifications alone mattered, every HR manager insisted that ‘family background’ was the clincher. “While Americans firms invoke race as a signal, the family in India is seen as a crucible of personal qualities. This would indeed contradict the idea of ‘merit’ which, as understood classically, entails rising above one’s station and family of origin,” says Newman. When questions in an interview turn to the ‘family’, it is invariably a euphemism for caste. “However eligible, if the candidate’s father was not a graduate or was a farmhand, the corporate sector would not give him a chance,” says Jodhka. Another study of Dalit and non-Dalit graduates from Delhi School of Economics, JNU and Jamia Milia Islamia found that several Dalit candidates preferred to ‘lie’ about their background during corporate interviews. The IIDS-Princeton study proves that merit is not a technical issue; it has a large social component.

The very structuring of this study demonstrates corporate casteism. When Jodhka and Newman wrote to HR managers formally seeking to interview them, Jodhka used the JNU letterhead and mentioned Princeton’s association with the study. IIDS, the pivot of the study, was never mentioned. “Had we used the IIDS letterhead, it is possible none of the HR managers would have even entertained our questions,” says Jodhka.

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