Merit Construction and Caste Loopholes in the Indian IT Social Habitus

The story of the IT merit culture making project, merit valorization, and caste reproduction is contextualized in the historical development of the Indian IT revolution, with its mixed implications. A portrait of the IT organization, work structures, and the merit culture making project is developed using the work experiences of rank-and-file IT professionals and other scholarly writings. Subjective IT merit metrics, such as English fluency, habits of the mind-intellect-spirit, integration, and other ‘soft’ skills of communication open up loopholes or spaces for introducing, sorting out, and stratifying IT employees by traditional social vectors of caste and even community, and religion. Caste positionality, filtering, and related pattern recognition in the hiring, retention, and promotion decision making in the IT work place have become the conduits through which caste dynamics are reproduced and reinforced in the Indian IT, transforming it into the new vector of inequality.

The Indian Information Technology Sector

The theoretical and empirical context for the analyses of caste reproduction in Indian IT is outlined. A perfect storm of events, the Y2K hysteria, the abundant skilled labour, the extant technology infrastructure in India, and the east-west time difference that led to the bourgeoning IT sector were reviewed. The globalization paradox of Indian IT, the extant evidence of multi-layered inequalities, and the growing political and public backlash against quotas or set-aside privileges for SC/ST/OBCs present a volatile mix. Theoretically speaking, streamlined merit is used to create appropriate difference between IT merit and the earmarked or reservation merit. But that IT merit skills, even of the pure kind, is deeply embedded but obscured, in the social and economic privileges of the dominant castes and classes and the holistic merit requirements of a globalized sector open up spaces for hidden caste privileges to filter through and colour pure merit with caste undertones.

Indian Information Technology, the New Caste Frontier

After reviewing the evidence for caste diffusion and reproduction in Indian IT, a case was made for deconstructing the caste-tinged merit construction project. If IT is to live up to its mantel of India’s saviour from historic caste inequalities, soft and hard strategies for transforming the IT work habitus into a Dalit caste diverse and inclusive space are outlined. While there will be intense resistance, a call is made to IT’s cutting-edge R&D divisions. Caste inclusive strategies will have to be self-arbitrated (like with an internal ombudsmen) and accompanied by reasonable and enforceable limits on caste based litigation. Evaluative evidence on the progress of caste diversity initiatives can be used by companies to verify, with hard evidence, official claims of companies as equal employment opportunity employers.

Merit vs. Caste ‘Blood Sport’ in the IT Work Arena

When rank-and-file IT professionals and their industry and knowledge leaders were invited to reflect on their views and experiences with caste in the merit construction process, the conversations became passionately vocal, sometimes even strident and combative, taking on tones of a metaphorical ‘blood sport’ pitting the Merit Camp against the Caste Camp. There was consensus on the small Dalit footprint and founder effect in Indian IT, but the explanations for the same were drastically different. To the Merit camp, the business and functional imperatives of a transnational IT sector required that they use EEO policies and not the caste-reservation quotas while the Caste camp countered that business imperatives have turned discriminatory and reinforced casteism in Indian IT. There is a stalemate in the Merit-Caste debate.

Merit and Gender Diversity

Despite gendered leakage in the engineering and general education pipelines, there is much progress in gender diversity or numerical parity in Indian IT. Gender parity in Indian IT has been achieved through gender neutral merit, even if privileged, and opportunities; Indian IT women professionals were as meritorious as men, equal to men on the streamlined pure merit metrics. But, significant hurdles exist in transforming the IT workspace into a gender inclusive one that makes room for family-work conflicts, systemic gendered glass ceiling and personal obstacles. The intersectionality of caste, family, and gender in dominant caste women’s access to IT networks through their strong family ties, has rendered gender inequality and equality more readily accessible and amenable for discussion, analyses, and redress than caste (in)equalities. The assessment of gender diversity progress in Indian IT offered a contrast point to the resistance to caste diversity.

Information Technology Education

The seeds of the Merit-Caste debate in the merit IT culture making project are sown early in secondary and higher technical education. The ‘blood sport’ in technical education has been fuelled by another perfect storm of events; the growing popularity of technical education and jobs, expansion of IT educational options through government resourced technical institutions, grievances about the never-ending shelf life of reservations, and perception of limited ‘unreserved seats’ in quality institutions of higher learning coupled with the expensive privatized options have added fuel to the antagonistic competition. In the final analyses, just as both public and private technical higher education institutions are the sites where IT merit is culturally constructed, they also become ideal sites for deconstructing the merit culture making project and revealing the project’s caste foundations.