— ✍️Nidhi Jarwal

India has undertaken the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015 and committed itself to equality, dignity, and development by the year 2030. The ranking of India on SDGs in the world has since then improved. The first time that the country appeared in the top 100 in 2025 was at position 99, which is commonly described as an achievement/evidence of improvement. However, development by rankings conceals a bigger fact: it informs us little about who has actually improved their lives.

In the case of communities discriminated against on work and descent (CDWD) -Dalits and Adivasis- time has not gone at the same rate as policy. They are mostly in the same social and economic hierarchy in India, although the indicators are becoming better. It is not a failure or an implementation but an outcome of a caste social order that continues to organize the access to education, work, justice, and dignity. India will not be able to achieve its SDGs without addressing caste as a background phenomenon and not as a structural obstacle.

This contradiction is brought to the fore through education that is sometimes referred to as the great equaliser. According to the data provided by the Unified District Information System for Education (UDISE), almost every fourth Adivasi student and every fifth Dalit student dropped out of Classes IX and X in 201920, which is exactly one in nine students of the general group. Such numbers are not indicative of inability or desire. They are a mirror of the discrimination-based classrooms, economic weakness, and humiliation that marginalised students may experience day in and day out before the opportunity can change their lives. The assurance of SDG 4 quality education is all and nothing when chances are met without security and dignity.

This does not mark the limit of this exclusion at school. Caste in the universities remains an identification of who is and who must bring out their existence at all times. The data provided by the University Grants Commission has indicated that a complaint of caste-based discrimination has increased by 118 percent in the past 5 years. This growth does not mean that discrimination has happened recently; it merely denotes that students are finally speaking out on what has long been established in institutions. In speaking, there is a price paid. The marginalised students further feel that they are isolated, neglected by the institution, and severely distressed in institutions that claim to be inclusive. It will be a poor development where the education reinforces caste hierarchy instead of breaking it.

An even worse reality is evident in the labour market. According to data released by the Periodic Labour Force Survey, 41.8 per cent of Dalit women work in the informal sector, the highest among all social groups, compared with 13.4 per cent of dominant-caste women working in casual wage labour. This is not accidental. The labour market in India is divided based on caste, with insecurity and danger being inherited and not selected. Although the economy grows, Dalits and Adivasis continue to be confined to unsafe, underrated, and low-income jobs. SDG 8 is a promise of decent work, but how can work be decent without dignity at birth?

No section of it is more prominent than the sanitation labour. Scavenging is an illegal act, but it occurs practically through caste bondage. The Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment responded to a question that was posed in the Lok Sabha by reporting that 377 workers had died between 2019 and 2023 when cleaning sewers and septic tanks. They are not sad mishaps but the logical working of a system, which places cleanliness in the cities, and threats in certain bodies. The SDG 6 glorifies sanitation without addressing the problem that caste labour makes development a moral failure.

Inequality as the core of the SDG agenda cannot be narrowed down to income. As demonstrated by the Oxfam India Inequality Report several times, caste remains an important factor in access to education, secure employment, and institutional power. The rich, the land, and the decision-making continue to be concentrated in the hands of people in power, with the already oppressed groups unable to get the door open. SDG 10, which aims at curbing inequalities, cannot work unless caste, the most ingrained and the most ancient form of inequality in India, goes by unmentioned.

Justice, too, remains uneven. National Crime Records Bureau has reported the conviction rate under the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act in 2023 to be only 31.9, and the pendency before the court was above 93. Laws are in place, yet justice is highly unequal. As far as Dalits and Adivasis are concerned, the law usually comes late, watered down, or not at all. SDG 16 gauges institutions as present and not as guardians of the most vulnerable to violence and exclusion. Justice delayed or denied is justice lost, and development becomes meaningless.

India has only six years to go to 2030, and the question is no longer whether it can change its SDG rankings but whether it is even ready to address the setups that have continued to leave millions of people permanently behind. The SDGs were not intended to control inequality, but to eliminate it with improved statistics. But caste, the most pervasive and persistent form of inequality in this country, is very much out of development planning.

Inclusion of communities that are discriminated based on work and descent is not based on charity or tokenism. It is a matter of righteousness and change. Until Dalits and Adivasis no longer serve as the default labour force in the most dangerous, devalued, and invisible jobs, the SDG claims of India will be empty rhetoric. Leaving no one behind can no longer be a motto. In India, it should start by eliminating caste-based exclusion, rather than practicing it.

-Nidhi Jarwal is a doctoral researcher in Philosophy at the University of Delhi. Her work engages with questions of democracy, ethics, and social justice.