Q.Survey three worker families near your home/school — ancestral place, migration reason, living conditions, children's schooling.

Even where a constitution formally grants every citizen equal rights, people's ability to actually exercise or benefit from those rights in real life can differ enormously depending on how rich or poor they are. This is the difference between having a right on paper and being able to use it.

The urban poor in India illustrate this well. Slum-dwellers and squatters exist in every Indian city; although they do necessary and useful work — as hawkers, petty traders, scavengers, domestic workers, plumbers, mechanics, or in small trades like cane weaving, textile printing, or tailoring — they are often blamed for straining civic resources or spreading crime, and live in overcrowded, insecure conditions with poor sanitation and no reliable water supply. Even a basic political right like the right to vote can be hard for them to exercise, since being on the voters' list requires a fixed address, which squatters and pavement dwellers often cannot provide.

The British sociologist T. H. Marshall's book Citizenship and Social Class (1950) gives a classic account of why rights and equality are so tightly linked to citizenship. Marshall defined citizenship as 'a status bestowed on those who are full members of a community. All who possess the status are equal with respect to the rights and duties with which the status is endowed.' For Marshall, equality has two aspects: the quality of the rights and duties citizens get keeps improving, and the number of people actually covered by the status keeps growing. He identified three kinds of rights that citizenship bundles together — civil rights (protecting an individual's life, liberty, and property), political rights (the ability to take part in governance), and social rights (access to education and employment) — which together make it possible for a citizen to live with real dignity. He saw social class as a 'system of inequality', and citizenship as the thing that counters its divisive effects and helps build a more integrated, harmonious community.

Real steps taken in India show this playing out: a national policy on urban street vendors, framed in January 2004, tried to protect the lakhs of street vendors in Indian cities from police and municipal harassment, so long as they followed regulation. In the landmark Olga Tellis vs Bombay Municipal Corporation case (1985), the Supreme Court held that the Article 21 right to life includes the right to livelihood, so pavement dwellers could not be evicted unless they were first given alternative accommodation — effectively reading a right to shelter into the Constitution.

Tribal people and forest dwellers, dependent on access to forests and natural resources for their way of life, are another group becoming marginalised — threatened by population pressure, and by commercial mining or tourism interests, with governments struggling to protect them without blocking development.

The broader lesson is that equal rights does not mean identical, one-size-fits-all policies for every citizen. Since different groups genuinely have different needs, making people more equal in practice sometimes requires tailoring policy to their specific circumstances, rather than treating everyone exactly alike.