By Harsh Mander
Harsh Mander is a writer and social activist, and founder and Director of the Centre for Equity Studies (CES), New Delhi. He was the former Special Commissioner to the Supreme Court, in the Right to Food case. Email: manderharsh@gmail.com
India Exclusion Reports assemble evidence about the success of governments in India to ensure equitable access to what we call public goods to all segments of people, especially those who are most disadvantaged, variously by class, caste, gender, religious identity, disability, age, ethnicity, language, education or geography. This annual series also portrays people excluded, sometimes expelled, from equitable and just access to a range of public goods, the lived experience of such excluded communities, and the role of the state, of laws, policies, institutions and budgets. the reports are evidence-based reflections of state succeeded or failed in fulfilling its constitutional mandate.
These reflections can be seen as exercises in applying the talisman which Mahatma Gandhi gave to us months before his assassination, which would require us to assess the impact of law and policy on the destinies of India’s most dispossessed peoples. The reports similarly gauge whether the contradictions which Dr Ambedkar foresaw and worried about between formal equality in political life and inequality in social and economic life have narrowed or actually widened. Or indeed measure the success of the nation in realizing the foremost challenges which India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru laid out before the Constituent Assembly, of fighting poverty, hunger and communal violence.