Q.Are the differences in the educational attainment of different communities depicted in the table below significant? Could these differences have taken place just by chance? Or do these differences point to the working of the caste system? Which factor other than the caste system do you see at work here?

The table (NSSO 55th round, 1999-2000) shows how many people per thousand hold a graduate degree, broken down by caste and community. …

The table records graduates per thousand persons in urban India, by caste and community: Scheduled Caste 47, Muslim 61, Hindu-OBC 86, Scheduled Tribes 109, Christian 237, Sikh 250, Hindu-Upper Caste 253, Other Religions 315, against an All-India average of 155.

The gap is enormous. Scheduled Castes, Muslims, Hindu-OBCs and Scheduled Tribes are all well below the all-India average — Scheduled Castes, at 47, sit at less than a third of the national figure. Sikhs, Christians, Hindu-Upper Castes and Other Religions, by contrast, are all comfortably above the average, with Hindu-Upper Castes at more than five times the Scheduled Caste figure.

A gap this large, and this systematically patterned, is very unlikely to be the result of chance. If the differences were simply random variation, we would not expect them to line up so closely and consistently with a long-established social hierarchy. The pattern instead fits an explanation rooted in the history of the caste system itself — communities placed low in that hierarchy were, for centuries, denied access to education and confined largely to manual labour, and the effects of that historical exclusion are still visible in this data. …