SPECIAL ARTICLE Economic & Political Weekly EPW march 13, 2010 vol xlv no 11 41 Work on this paper was completed at the Indian Institute of Dalit Studies and was funded by the World Bank, New Delhi. I am grateful to Maitreyi Das and Sujata Pradhan for their support. S K Thorat, Sneha Komath, Sobin George and Tanvi Sirari gave useful comments on an earlier draft of the paper. Sunil Gautam, Satish Tusaner, Dinesh Tejan, Suresh Gautam, Suraj Badtiya and Avinash Kumar helped with fieldwork and data processing. I am grateful to all of them as well. Usual disclaimers apply. Surinder S Jodhka (ssjodhka@yahoo.com) is at the Indian Institute of Dalit Studies, New Delhi. Dalits in Business: Self-Employed Scheduled Castes in North-West India Surinder S Jodhka Academic writings have invariably tended to look at caste as a traditional system of social hierarchy and culture, which is expected to weaken and eventually disappear with the process of economic development and urbanisation/modernisation. Caste has indeed undergone many changes with development and urbanisation, but it continues to be an important fact in the public life of the country. We do not have many empirical studies that help us understand the contemporary nature of the reality of caste. What are the experiences of dalits who have ventured to set up their own businesses and enterprises? What are the ways in which dalits in the urban labour market negotiate with prejudice and discrimination? A survey of dalit businesses in two urban centres of Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh tries to answer these questions. I n its attempt to respond to emerging challenges of post-cold war world India initiated a process of reforms in its economic policy during the early 1990s. These reforms proved to be an important turning point for the country in many different ways. Under the new regime, the state began to withdraw from its di- rect involvement with the economy. Private enterprise was al- lowed and encouraged to expand into areas of economic activity that were hitherto not open to it. Though some scholars have pointed to the fact that the growth of private capital in India began to accelerate during the early 1970s (Kohli 2006: 1361-70), it is during the post-1991 period that the private capital in India experienced expansion at an unprecedented rate. This expansion was not merely in terms of growth rates and profits; India also experienced an important ideological shift during the 1990s. The socialist rhetoric that had been so central to the Nehruvian idea of planned development lost its charm. Markets and middle classes came to occupy the centre stage of India’s cultural landscape, displacing the emblematic village and its poor peasants. The Nehruvian state had also worked out its own modes of dealing with those who had historically been on the margins of Indian society. The quotas or reservations in government sector jobs and state-funded educational institutions was the core of the state policy for development of scheduled castes ( SCs) and scheduled tribes ( STs). Growing privatisation of India’s economy and declining ave- nues of employment in the state sector also meant shrinking of jobs available under the quota system for reserved categories. The expanding role of private sector in technical and professional education could similarly contract the space given to the histori- cally marginalised groups in India’s higher education system. It was in response to the growing restiveness among a section of the dalit intellectuals about this negative implication of liberali- sation policy that, upon coming to power at the centre in 2004, the United Progressive Alliance ( UPA) proposed extension of the quota system for SCs and STs to the private sector. 1 Apart from the proposal of extending the quota regime to the private sector, there have also been proposals of encouraging and supporting direct participation of the historically marginalised groups in the private economy as entrepreneurs and capital holders. 2 Though the state is called upon to play an active role in the process by provision of economic support through loans and regulation of markets, the emphasis is on development of entre- preneurial culture that can enable dalits to participate in the pri- vate sector and informal economy on equal terms. However, dalits are not only poor, they also face discrimination in the labour