The US isn't the only country with a caste system: India's Scheduled Castes, or Dalits, make up about 10% of the country's population, but they only have about one-third of the jobs in the country's private sector, the Guardian reports.
That's why the Bharatiya Janata Party, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, is pushing for a constitutional amendment that would give them 10% of government jobs and 30% of private-sector jobs.
The Scheduled Castes Act, which was passed in 2006, was meant to give them a better shot at jobs and higher education, but it's also been criticized for giving jobs to family members of those on the lower rungs of the caste system.
"What about equal opportunity? What about equal opportunity? These are policies followed by even western countries in countries to provide affirmative opportunities for minorities," an Indian journalist writes in an op-ed in the Guardian.
"The private might refuse the concept of reservation from about about the bottom rungs," he adds. "What about equal opportunity? The private sector must focus on what the industry has been doing to the historical wrongs oppressed by us."
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Ganesh Natarajan is the Founder and Chairman of 5FWorld, a new platform for funding and developing start-ups, social enterprises and the skills eco-system in India. In the past two decades, he has built two of India’s high-growth software services companies – Aptech and Zensar – almost from scratch to global success.