Nakkeeran N, S. Jadhav, A. Bhattacharya, Sunil Gamit, Chetan Mehta, Pratiksha Purohit, Ruchi Patel, Minal Doshi
{"title":"Recasting Food","authors":"Nakkeeran N, S. Jadhav, A. Bhattacharya, Sunil Gamit, Chetan Mehta, Pratiksha Purohit, Ruchi Patel, Minal Doshi","doi":"10.26812/caste.v1i1.6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.26812/caste.v1i1.6","url":null,"abstract":"Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) is the principal programme operating in India to address issues around child development, malnutrition and pre-school education. A package of services – including the Supplementary Nutrition Programme (SNP), pre-school education, immunization, health check-ups, referral services, and nutrition and health education – are provided through an Anganwadi Centre (AWC) with an Anganwadi Worker (AWW) and an Anganwadi Helper (AWH) for roughly every one thousand people. From the mid-1990s, there have been successive efforts on the part of the Government of India to universalize ICDS, and there has been a multi-fold increase in funds allocated to this programme between the 8th Five-Year Plan (1992–93 to 1996–97) and the 12th Five-Year Plan (2012–17) (1-2). However, the utilization of all services under ICDS continues to be grossly low. Close to 75 percent of children aged 0–71 months in the areas covered by AWCs did not receive any supplementary food from the centres, and less than 12 percent of children received supplementary food ‘almost daily’. For children aged 36–71 months this figure is 15.5 percent. More than 80 percent of children were not weighed at all. It has been reported that children belonging to economically backward and socially marginalised families, including Dalit, tribal, and religious minorities, are excluded from utilising these services through unfavourable institutional rules and structural factors. Equally, members of well-off families do not use services provided by AWCs – especially the SNP – for under-6 children. A multi-sited ethnographic study was conducted in four villages in Gujarat in order to identify the reasons behind poor utilisation of AWCs, especially the SNP services. The study aimed to understand everyday experience of households around the SNP in rural settings and an opportunity to study AWCs as institutions embedded in the context of village cultural life. The authors hypothesise that a study focusing on AWCs could serve as an illustrative case to highlight challenges in implementing other entitlement-based programmes.","PeriodicalId":72535,"journal":{"name":"Caste (Waltham, Mass.)","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46697490","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Empire of Disgust","authors":"R. Sampath","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780199487837.001.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199487837.001.0001","url":null,"abstract":"All known societies exclude and stigmatize one or more minority groups. Frequently these exclusions are underwritten with a rhetoric of disgust: people of a certain group, it is alleged, are filthy, hyper-animal, or not fit to share such facilities as drinking water, food, and public swimming pools with the ‘clean’ and ‘fully human’ majority. But exclusions vary in their scope and also in the specific disgust-ideologies underlying them. In this volume, interdisciplinary scholars from the United States and India present a detailed comparative study of the varieties of prejudice and stigma that pervade contemporary social and political life: prejudice along the axes of caste, race, gender, age, sexual orientation, transgender, disability, religion, and economic class. In examining these forms of stigma and their intersections, the authors present theoretically pluralistic and empirically sensitive accounts that both explain group-based stigma and suggest ways forward. These forward-looking remedies, including group resistance to subordination as well as institutional and legal change, point the way towards a public culture that is informed by our diverse histories of discrimination and therefore equipped to eliminate stigma in all of its multifaceted forms.","PeriodicalId":72535,"journal":{"name":"Caste (Waltham, Mass.)","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48097628","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Commentary on Ambedkar's Posthumously Published \"Philosophy of Hinduism\" - Part II","authors":"R. Sampath","doi":"10.26812/caste.v2i1.300","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.26812/caste.v2i1.300","url":null,"abstract":"This paper continues the commentary on Dr. B. R. Ambedkar’s posthumously published Philosophy of Hinduism. Utilizing resources from various modern continental European philosophers and social theorists, particularly of religion, we elaborate on several key passages within Ambedkar’s overall framework of analysis. The paper continues to explore how Ambedkar conceives relations between philosophy and religion, and how historical shifts in general human consciousness have occurred whereby altering both fields. At the core of his being, Ambedkar is concerned with a methodological justification that will enable him to venture into a penetrating critique of the immoral and amoral nature of Hinduism’s social system of caste. In Part I of the commentary, we followed Ambedkar until he arrived at the criteria of ‘justice’ and ‘utility’ to judge the status of Hinduism. He wanted to test whether this Eastern world religion, which descends from antiquity, meets those criteria, which shape the modern conception of religion. In Part II of this commentary, we expand further on Ambedkar’s thesis as to why Hinduism fails to meet the modern conception when those twin criteria are not met. This thought presupposes various underlying philosophical transformations of the relations of ‘God to man’, ‘Society to man’, and ‘man to man’ within which the Hindu-dominated Indian society forecloses the possibility of individual equality, freedom, and dignity. In making contributions to Ambedkar studies, the philosophy of religion, and political philosophies of justice, this paper sets up Part III of the commentary, which will examine Ambedkar’s actual engagement with the classics of Hinduism’s philosophy and thought in general. Ultimately, Ambedkar is undeterred in his original critique of the social and moral failures of the caste system, thereby intimating ambitious possibilities for its eventual eradication.","PeriodicalId":72535,"journal":{"name":"Caste (Waltham, Mass.)","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69137864","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}