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New Delhi, Sept. 23 -- On Republic Day this year, billionaires Kalpana Saroj and Milind Kamble were among the Padma awardees, the nation's highest civilian honours. The award was less a celebration of material wealth and more of human triumph over adversity as these two awardees rose from a life of crushing poverty and marginalization and against all odds achieved unprecedented success.
They are members of the Dalit Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (DICCI), founded on 14 April 2005, the birth anniversary of B.
R. Ambedkar, who is acknowledged by DICCI as their "messiah and the intellectual father". Interestingly, while Ambedkar was responsible for making compensatory discrimination for Dalits mandatory through constitutionally guaranteed reservation in government jobs, DICCI rejects job reservation as a means to Dalit emancipation as they feel quotas have added yet another (negative) stereotype to the Dalits, seen as they are as "the State's jamais" (sons-in-law of the state). Instead of depending on the state to provide Dalits decent jobs, DICCI has adopted as its mission statement "be job givers, not job seekers", exhorting members of the Dalit community in India to become entrepreneurs.
DICCI focuses on entrepreneurship, as it believes that "Dalit Capitalism" will help Dalits rise to the top of the social pyramid, and will pave the way for the end of the caste system. However, in order to understand the spread of "Dalit Capitalism" it is not enough to focus on the top end of Dalit businesses (the Dalit billionaires), but instead, to investigate the extent and spread of Dalit participation in small businesses, which more accurately reflects the material conditions of millions of Dalits who are not in wage employment. In 2004-2005, according to the National Sample Survey (NSS), in rural India, 34% of Scheduled Caste (SC) and 46% of Scheduled Tribe (ST) households were in self-employment (with corresponding urban proportions being 29% and 26%).
We use unit-level data from the registered manufacturing segment of the third and fourth rounds of the Indian Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME) census for 2001-2002 and 2006-2007, respectively, to understand the changes in involvement of Dalits, Adivasis and women in this sector. Our work confirms several earlier findings, but significantly expands the state of knowledge on this subject by, one,...