Indian society & diversity

NCERT calls India a 'state-nation': many religious, linguistic and ethnic identities live under one state without being asked to merge. With 22 Scheduled Languages and every major faith, this unity rests on accommodation, not uniformity, which is why communalism and regionalism test it rather than end it.

What makes unity in diversity the defining feature

✏️ Diagram to draw in your answer

• Civilisational bonds: pilgrimage circuits, Bhakti and Sufi syncretism and the freedom struggle gave a shared memory before a shared state.
  • Nehru's 'unity amidst diversity' in The Discovery of India; Amartya Sen's argumentative tradition of dialogue across faiths.
• Constitutional glue: secularism as basic structure (S.R. Bommai, 1994), minority rights (Articles 25–30) and the Article 51A(e) duty to promote harmony.
• Accommodating federalism: the States Reorganisation Commission (1953) led to linguistic states from 1956; three new states in 2000 met tribal and regional aspirations.
  • Article 371 and the Sixth Schedule offer special arrangements, so aspiration need not become secession.
• Everyday integration: national markets, migration, the armed forces, cinema and cricket bind daily life across regions.

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NCERT's sociology text calls it a paradox: for the urban upper-caste middle class, which gained most from post-colonial development, caste has become 'invisible', while for Dalits it still decides marriage, housing and work. The city has changed caste's form rather than ended it, and the examples below test both halves of that claim.

Where city life has weakened caste

• Anonymous work: offices, factories and gig platforms hire by credential and clock, not birth; purity–pollution rules cannot survive shared canteens and crowded trains (NCERT).
• Constitutional levers: Article 17 abolished untouchability, Article 15(2) opened shops and hotels to all, and reservation built a Dalit–OBC class of professionals.
  • Ambedkar urged Dalits to leave the village, which he saw as a sink of localism and narrow-mindedness, for the anonymity of the city.
• Westernisation (M.N. Srinivas): English schooling, dress and diet blur the ritual markers by which caste was once read on the street.
• Choice in marriage: love marriages and 'caste no bar' listings grow in metros; Shakti Vahini (2018) placed an adult's choice of partner under Articles 19 and 21.
• Dalit enterprise: bodies like the Dalit Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry show capital, not caste, can define a businessman's standing.

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NCERT notes that caste confines marriage within the caste. Endogamy guards both caste and religious community, but it is cracking along caste lines faster.

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Why intercaste marriages have grown

• Wider contact: education, urban jobs, migration and matrimonial platforms mix youth across caste.
• Parity eases acceptance: similar economic and ritual rank means families see no fall in status.
• State support: couples earning up to Rs 5 lakh could get Rs 2.50 lakh under the Dr. Ambedkar Scheme for Social Integration through Inter-Caste Marriages (2014-15; merged into a centrally sponsored scheme in 2023).
• Protection: after the Shakti Vahini judgment (27 March 2018), MHA advised States on preventive, remedial and punitive steps.
• Limits: still a small minority; upper caste–Dalit unions meet violence.

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The Fifteenth Finance Commission gave income distance — how far a State's per capita income lags — a 45% weight in sharing central taxes, the largest of any criterion. That single number shows how deep regional disparity runs, and why it must be told apart from diversity.

What regional disparity is

• Definition: a persistent, measurable gap in income, infrastructure and human development between States, or between regions within a State.
• Markers: per capita income, multidimensional poverty, infant mortality, literacy, bank credit and industrial investment.

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Census 2011 put the literacy rate of Scheduled Tribes at 58.96% against 72.99% for all Indians. Identity and disadvantage visibly overlap in India, but the overlap is neither complete nor fixed, and correlation is not cause.

Where diversity and marginality overlap

• Tribe: the Xaxa Committee found 63.7% of tribal people below the poverty line in 1993–94, against 45.7% for the population as a whole.
• Caste: Article 17 abolished untouchability, yet its legacy survives in Dalit landlessness, atrocities and manual scavenging.
• Religion: the Sachar Committee (2006) found Muslims lagging in education, government jobs and credit.
• Region and language: tribal-language belts of the central highlands and the North-East sit far from markets and the State.
• Intersections: Dalit, tribal and Muslim women face the compounded disadvantage of gender and identity.

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In the middle Ganga plain the rain-bearing monsoon blows from the east, so Bhojpuri speech calls it Purvaiya, the easterly. The name is geography; its songs are culture.

Why the south-west monsoon is 'Purvaiya'

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• Deflection: the Arakan Hills turn the Bay of Bengal branch into West Bengal from the south and south-east.
• Channelling: the Himalaya and the north-west thermal low send one arm westward along the Ganga plain.
• Local contrast: the local westerly is the dry summer loo, so only the easterly means rain.

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In Hindu tradition marriage is a samskara, a sacred lifelong union of duty rather than a contract. Modern India has not discarded this ideal; it is rewriting its terms.

Signs the sacrament is weakening

• Law of exit: Section 13-B of the Hindu Marriage Act allows divorce by mutual consent, making an indissoluble bond dissoluble.
• Judicial shift: in Shilpa Sailesh (2023) a Constitution Bench held the Supreme Court may dissolve a marriage under Article 142(1) for irretrievable breakdown, even if one spouse opposes.
• Choice over duty: education, women's paid work and city life make compatibility the test; live-in, inter-caste and inter-faith unions are more visible.

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The family is the site of primary socialisation, whose most critical stage comes in the early years (NCERT). A phone in place of the lap robs that first school of its teacher.

✏️ Diagram to draw in your answer

Impact on socialisation

• Attachment: cuddling and eye contact build trust; a screen cannot respond, so security weakens.
• Language and thought: words grow in back-and-forth talk; passive viewing slows vocabulary, attention and imagination.
• Social skills: shared meals and play teach turn-taking, empathy and patience; screens teach none of these.
• Self-control: the phone as pacifier stops a child learning to wait or calm down; tantrums follow its removal.
• Values: advertising and unfiltered content become silent teachers, sidelining parents.
• Health: poor sleep, eye strain, less outdoor play.

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The Rigveda, compiled c. 1500–1000 BCE in the Sapta-Sindhu region, records a pastoral, kin-based people; later Vedic texts show settled kingdoms, sharper hierarchy and elaborate ritual. Several of these features still shape Indian society, though in altered form.

Main features of Vedic society

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• Kinship base: the family (kula) was inseparable from the jana; later, kula came to mean a household of several kin members.
• Women: they attended the sabha and joined rituals; Rigvedic hymns are attributed to women sages such as Apala, Ghosha and Lopamudra.
• Life stages: the ashrama scheme divided life into brahmacharya, grihastha, vanaprastha and sanyasa, guided by dharma, artha, kama and moksha.

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The Delhi Sultanate, established in 1206, tied northern India to West and Central Asia. Along that link came techniques that changed how Indians irrigated, spun, wrote, built and fought, and through them, how society was organised.

Major technological changes

• Water-lifting: the Persian wheel, a geared chain of pots, lifted water from deep wells; the Babur Nama later described such devices across north India.
• Textiles: the spinning wheel (charkha) and cotton-carding bow multiplied yarn output; the Sufi Charkhanama, a song set to its rhythm, shows how familiar it became.
• Paper: it spread for records, accounts and books, gradually displacing palm leaf and birch bark.
• Building: the true arch, dome and lime mortar, and waterworks such as the Hauz Khas tank, built by Alauddin Khalji to supply Siri Fort.
• Warfare: improved cavalry equipment, and late in the period gunpowder: Babur's victory over Ibrahim Lodi at Panipat (1526) relied heavily on field artillery.

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M.N. Srinivas, through his ideas of Sanskritisation and dominant caste, showed that caste was never a frozen ladder. Yet birth still fixes membership. Caste is fluid in what it does and static in who belongs.

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Why caste identity is static

• Ascription: membership comes by birth and cannot be resigned or earned.
• Endogamy: marriage within the caste reproduces it every generation and blocks the blurring of caste lines.
• Hierarchy: Article 17 abolished untouchability, and the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 strengthened punishment, yet exclusion from homes, water and temples persists in places.
• Descent-based work: manual scavenging, still done mostly by Dalits, shows how stigma clings to birth.

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The Time Use Survey 2024 found women aged 15–59 doing unpaid domestic work spend about 305 minutes a day on it. Pandemic lockdowns brought paid work into this unequal space.

Gains for family relationships

• Time and presence: no commute means shared meals, and fathers drawn into parenting that office hours denied.
• Care: migrant professionals moved back near ageing parents; couples shared childcare.
• Flexibility: women keep careers through childbirth, childcare or a spouse's transfer.

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Census 2011 counted Scheduled Tribes at 8.6 per cent of India's population, about 104 million people, from Andaman hunter-gatherers to Northeast cultivators. Yet in some contexts their shared condition matters more than their differences.

Contexts for a single category

• Constitutional identity: Article 366(25) defines STs through Presidential notification under Article 342; the shared tests include distinctive culture, geographical isolation and backwardness.
• Affirmative action: reservations in education and jobs (Articles 15(4), 16(4)) and seats in Parliament and assemblies (Articles 330, 332) treat STs as one class.
• Protective governance: the Fifth and Sixth Schedules, PESA 1996 and the Forest Rights Act 2006 secure self-rule, land and forest rights on a common footing.
• Shared disadvantage: land alienation and displacement by dams and mines justify common bodies such as the National Commission for Scheduled Tribes.
• Political voice: one category gives bargaining weight for autonomy and customary law, as in Jharkhand and the Northeast.

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A sect (panth, sampradaya) is a devotional path within a religion, gathered round a founder, guru or doctrine. Joined by belief rather than birth, it cuts across caste, region and religion, which gives it unusual salience in Indian society.

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Sect vis-a-vis caste

• Protest against birth status: Bhakti and Sant sects rejected hierarchy; Basavanna's Virashaivas or Lingayats and Kabir's followers preached devotion open to all.
• Sect turns caste: over generations sects become endogamous and caste-like; Lingayats remain an important community in Karnataka today.
• Alternative dignity: where Sanskritisation (M.N. Srinivas) means copying upper-caste ritual, sects and deras offer Dalit and backward groups dignity outside the ladder.

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A subcontinent is a large, distinct part of a continent. Bounded by the Himalaya and the Indian Ocean, India and its neighbours form a great geographic entity within Asia, with India at its core.

Physical separation

• Mountain wall: the Himalaya and other ranges formed a formidable barrier, crossed only through passes such as Khyber, Bolan, Shipkila, Nathula and Bomdila.
• Seas on three sides: the Arabian Sea, Bay of Bengal and Indian Ocean frame the peninsula.

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Scheduled Tribes formed 8.6 per cent of India's population in 2011 (Census). Their knowledge is oral, experiential and community-held, which sets it apart from the written, certified knowledge of the mainstream.

What makes tribal knowledge unique

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• Sacred ecology: nature worship has preserved sacred groves as near-pristine forests, conservation without a statute.
• Folk science: tribal communities tell edible from poisonous mushrooms by folk taxonomy; Apatani wet-rice-cum-fish farming joins two food systems.
• Art as record: Warli painting of Maharashtra and Pithoro of Gujarat carry myth and memory.

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Indian society changes by adaptation rather than rupture. M.N. Srinivas's Sanskritisation and Westernisation, and Robert Redfield's great and little traditions, show old frames absorbing new content, so continuity and change run side by side.

How continuity is maintained

• Family and kinship: socialisation passes on duty, respect for elders and interdependence; NCERT cites A.M. Shah that the joint family actually increased after Independence as life expectancy rose.
• Religion and ritual: festivals, rites of passage, pilgrimage and the epics renew shared values across generations.
• Caste and community: endogamy, jati networks and village bodies enforce norms through approval and sanction.
• Great and little traditions: textual, elite traditions and oral, village-level ones keep feeding each other.
• Adaptive reworking: groups take up new customs through Sanskritisation, and caste finds new roles in democratic politics, as the Rudolphs' title The Modernity of Tradition (1967) suggests.
• Technology as carrier: matrimonial sites still match by community, and festivals and rituals are streamed online.

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NCRB registered 57,582 crimes against Scheduled Castes in 2022, 13.1% more than in 2021. Caste has shed much of its ritual rigidity, but it has changed form rather than lost relevance.

Where caste has weakened

• Ritual hierarchy: Article 17 abolished untouchability; urban anonymity, schooling and new jobs erode rules of food, contact and hereditary work.
• Mobility: reservation has built a Dalit and OBC middle class that claims rights as citizens, not by ritual rank.

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Potti Sriramulu's death after a 56-day fast forced the linguistic reorganisation of Madras province. Culture lit that spark, but grievances over power and resources keep regionalism alive; I agree only in part.

✏️ Timeline to draw in your answer

Where cultural assertion drives regionalism

• Language: in Tamil Nadu the DMK rode a massive student anti-Hindi agitation to power, making language the core of regional politics.
• Ethnicity: the Assam Movement (1979–1985) against 'outsiders' rested on cultural pride, and also on economic backwardness.

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NCERT's sociology texts frame the debate as homogenisation versus glocalisation: does a global market make cultures alike, or blend global forms with local content? In India, globalisation strains diversity at the margins but has not overwhelmed pluralism; the graver threat is the identity backlash it can provoke.

Where the threat is real

• Homogenisation: global brands, English-language media and fast food sell one aspirational lifestyle, crowding out local dress, crafts, cuisines and festivals.
• Endangered languages: the SPPEL documentation scheme has identified 117 endangered languages (PIB, 2025), among them Toda of the Nilgiris.
• Dislocation: market forces and large projects displace artisans, tribal communities and small traders, and the cultures tied to those livelihoods erode.
• Backlash: a sense of cultural invasion fuels exclusivist identity politics on religious, linguistic and regional lines, amplified by social media; this threatens pluralism more than foreign goods do.

✏️ Diagram to draw in your answer

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Customs give a community continuity and identity, but once placed beyond question they harden into dogma. I agree only in part: custom has at times silenced reason in India, yet reason has also grown within tradition and reformed it from inside.

Where custom suppresses reason

• Harmful practices: sati, untouchability, child marriage and witch-hunting were defended as tradition against evidence and humanity.
• Questioning as sacrilege: such practices lasted because doubting them was treated as impiety, which is the essence of obscurantism.
• Living superstition: after the murder of rationalist Narendra Dabholkar, Maharashtra enacted its 2013 law against human sacrifice, Aghori practices and black magic.

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Indian society has absorbed Greeks, Scythians, Turks and Europeans without losing its core; sociologist Robert Redfield's great and little traditions describe how classical and local practices live side by side. Its genius is digesting change, not resisting it.

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Indian secularism keeps a principled distance from all religions: Article 25 guarantees religious practice, yet the State may regulate and reform it. Friction arises when regulation reads as hostility.

Challenges in the name of secularism

• Courts deciding faith: the 'essential religious practices' test makes judges sort belief from custom, inviting charges of intrusion.
• Custom versus rights: on 22 August 2017 the Supreme Court set aside instant triple talaq as violative of Article 14; the 2019 Act made it void and punishable.
• Temple entry: the Sabarimala ruling (2018) set women's equality against a shrine's custom and divided devotees.
• Public-order curbs: limits on loudspeakers, processions, firecrackers and jallikattu feel like cultural attacks, though defended on health and animal welfare.
• Perceived selectivity: State control of Hindu temples, uneven personal laws and the open Uniform Civil Code question (Article 44) feed charges of double standards, as the Shah Bano case (1985) showed.

✏️ Table to draw in your answer

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Article 19 lets every citizen reside and settle in any part of India, and Article 29 protects any section with a distinct language, script or culture. Migration, trade, faith, exile and public enterprise have used this freedom to build small Indias across the country.

Yes: small Indias across the nation

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• Metros: Mumbai's Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil and Malayali neighbourhoods, and Kolkata's Marwari, Chinese (Tangra) and Armenian heritage, hold the nation in one city.
• Historic enclaves: Kochi's Jewish and Syrian Christian legacy, the Parsi communities of Gujarat and Mumbai, and Puducherry's French quarter keep layered identities alive.
• Exile and refugee settlements: Tibetans granted asylum built monasteries at Bylakuppe in Karnataka, with the Dalai Lama living in Dharamshala; Sindhi Partition refugees built Ulhasnagar near Mumbai.
• Institutional townships: steel towns, railway colonies, cantonments and central universities pool people from every State and breed hybrid speech, food and festivals.
• Pilgrimage and festival sites: Varanasi, Tirupati, Puri and the Kumbh draw devotees from every region, forming temporary small Indias.

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NCERT frames this debate as homogenisation versus glocalisation: will all cultures become alike, or will the global blend with the local? India's experience suggests both are happening at once.

Signs that local identity is being lost

• Language shift: English dominates jobs and aspiration, and smaller mother tongues and tribal languages lose young speakers.
• Uniform consumption: global brands, fast food, fashion and streaming push a uniform culture, which political scientists call cultural homogenisation.
• Crafts and livelihoods: mass-made goods undercut handloom and crafts, and migration thins the village patrons of folk arts.
• Commercialised festivals: rituals turn into branded events, valued for spectacle more than community.

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NCERT notes that caste, once rooted in purity and pollution, now often works as a political pressure group, a shift called the secularisation of caste. The statement reads this change of form as proof of permanence.

✏️ Diagram to draw in your answer

New identities and associational forms

• Associations and parties: caste associations and, since the 1980s, explicitly caste-based parties press their demands on the State.
• Dominant castes: M.N. Srinivas's dominant caste shows landowning jatis turning numbers into power.
• Persistence: endogamy, jati networks in jobs and credit, and caste-sorted matrimonial columns keep boundaries alive.
• Reservation politics: quotas widen access but harden categories, spurring new claims.

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Globalisation carries global brands, media and lifestyles into India, yet it also produces cultural heterogenisation: each culture becomes more distinct even as contact grows. In India, homogenisation and specificity rise together.

The homogenising pull

• Common consumer culture: global brands, fast food, English, Hollywood and streaming content narrow differences in dress, taste and aspiration among urban youth.

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The States Reorganisation Commission (1953) led to the States Reorganisation Act, 1956, which created 14 States and six Union Territories largely on linguistic lines. Language, however, is one strand of culture, so in most of India the region, not the State, is the living cultural unit.

Why regions form cultural units

• Dialect regions: the Census groups Bhojpuri, Magadhi, Bundelkhandi and Chhattisgarhi under 'Hindi', yet each marks a distinct folk culture.
• Regions straddling States: Mithila painting belongs to the Mithila region of northern Bihar, while others cross borders:

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• Tribal belts: the Munda and Santhal culture of the Chota Nagpur region spreads over several States.
• Sub-State identity: Telangana was carved out of Andhra Pradesh in 2014 despite a shared language; Vidarbha and Harit Pradesh demands persist.

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Article 46 directs the State to promote with special care the educational and economic interests of the weaker sections, especially SCs and STs, and to protect them from social injustice and exploitation. Two laws give this duty teeth.

Initiative 1: Prevention of Atrocities Act, 1989

• Purpose: the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act defines atrocities, punishes them, and provides special courts and relief for victims.
• Strengthened: its 2015 amendment, in force from 26 January 2016, added offences such as garlanding with footwear and forcing the disposal of carcasses.
• Gaps: reluctance to register cases, delayed investigation and low conviction rates.

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The Preamble names fraternity beside liberty and equality, but the habit it names is far older. Tolerance (accepting difference) and love (active fellowship) have long bound India's many faiths, languages and sects, and both still do public work.

Tolerance and love from early times

• Ashoka's dhamma: his edicts, such as the rock edict at Girnar, urged all sects to study and accept each other's best teachings.
• Plural philosophy: the Mundaka Upanishad's satyameva jayate (truth alone triumphs) and the ideal of vasudhaiva kutumbakam, the world as one family, placed truth above sect.
• Refuge for strangers: Syrian Christians found on the Malabar coast a home where they could worship freely; Parsis and Jews became part of India's minorities.
• Bhakti and Sufi love: Guru Nanak (1469–1539) and Kabir taught devotion beyond ritual, while Chishti dargahs such as Shaikh Muinuddin Sijzi's at Ajmer drew devotees of every faith.
• Statecraft: Akbar abolished the jizya and promoted sulh-i kul, literally 'peace with all'.

✏️ Table to draw in your answer

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Religiosity is personal faith and practice. NCERT describes communalism as aggressive chauvinism based on religious identity and stresses that it is about politics, not religion. The two differ in nature, aim and method.

Religiosity versus communalism

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• Methods: religiosity works through worship, ritual and charity; communalism through propaganda, symbols, mass mobilisation and often violence.
• No necessary link: a communalist may not be devout, and a devout believer may not be communal; what marks the communalist is hostility towards other identities.
• Constitutional standing: Articles 25–28 protect religiosity as freedom of religion; the State must stop that freedom being turned into a tool of division.

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Census 2011 data, published since the exam, grouped 19,569 raw mother-tongue returns into 121 languages, a measure of the plural core that globalisation meets. Since 1991, the free flow of goods, media and people has changed India's visible culture quickly; its core of language, faith, kinship and region changes slowly.

✏️ Diagram to draw in your answer

How globalisation has eroded diversity

• Consumer culture: global brands, malls, fast food and Western dress create a similar urban lifestyle across the metros.
• Language shift: English has become the language of aspiration; smaller languages and dialects lose speakers as schooling and jobs move.
• Crafts and livelihoods: handloom and artisan products compete with cheap mass-produced goods, breaking the bond between craft and community.
• Family and values: nuclear households, individual choice in careers and marriage, and consumerism loosen customs once set by the community.

Prepared by Minimalist IAS to the answer standard of Shivam Singh (mentor, 7 years) · facts checked against official sources (how we verify) · updated 16 Oct 2026. UPSC publishes no model answers: compare your structure and coverage with this, then write your own.

Census 2011 counted 10.45 crore Scheduled Tribes, 8.6% of India's population, in over 705 distinct groups. 'Scheduled' is a legal label, not an anthropological one: a community qualifies only when placed on the list, or schedule, notified under Article 342.

Why 'Scheduled Tribes'

• Presidential notification: the President, after consulting the Governor, notifies a State's tribes (first by the 1950 Order); only Parliament, by law, can alter that list.
• Definition: Article 366(25) defines Scheduled Tribes as those deemed so under Article 342, replacing the 'backward tribes' of the Government of India Act 1935.
• Tests: the Lokur Committee (1965) used primitive traits, distinct culture, geographical isolation, shyness of contact and backwardness, so a tribe may be scheduled in one State only.

Prepared by Minimalist IAS to the answer standard of Shivam Singh (mentor, 7 years) · facts checked against official sources (how we verify) · updated 16 Oct 2026. UPSC publishes no model answers: compare your structure and coverage with this, then write your own.

Regionalism is loyalty to a region's identity and interests, voiced as demands for autonomy, statehood or a fairer share of resources. People carry regional and national identities together; regionalism grows when the regional one feels slighted.

Basis of regionalism

✏️ Diagram to draw in your answer

• Language and culture: the States Reorganisation Commission (1953) led to linguistic States in 1956, proof of how strongly language binds a region.
• Relative deprivation: a felt gap in jobs, irrigation, investment or representation compared with neighbouring regions.
• Political mobilisation: regional parties turn identity and grievance into a programme and a vote base.

Prepared by Minimalist IAS to the answer standard of Shivam Singh (mentor, 7 years) · facts checked against official sources (how we verify) · updated 16 Oct 2026. UPSC publishes no model answers: compare your structure and coverage with this, then write your own.