Social Exclusion and Economic Discrimination: Analysing the Socio-Economic Marginalisation of Dalit Christians in India

Abstract

Dalit Christians in India experience a form of double marginalization —socially, within the entrenched caste hierarchy, and institutionally, through exclusion from the Scheduled Caste (SC) protections provided under the Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order of 1950. This study employs a narrative review and conceptual synthesis approach to interrogate the denial of SC recognition as a state-mediated socioeconomic stratification process, examined across three analytical domains: educational attainment, labor market outcomes, and asset ownership. Drawing on peer-reviewed literature, government commission reports, and national data sources published between 2000 and 2025, this study conceptualizes exclusion as a cumulative causal process in which constitutional ineligibility restricts access to affirmative action, thereby lowering the expected returns to human capital investment, restricting occupational mobility, constraining productive asset accumulation, and reinforcing intergenerational poverty. Evidence from Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and selected national sources indicates that Dalit Christians are under-represented in higher education, over-represented in informal and low-paid employment, and characterized by higher household poverty, with an incidence estimated at around 30 percent —substantially above that of their caste-Hindu and upper-caste Christian counterparts. Given the largely observational nature of the underlying evidence, the findings are presented as theory-driven associations rather than as causal estimates. The study concludes with institutionally feasible and constitutionally informed policy recommendations across four domains: legal recognition, educational equity, labor market inclusion, and asset building. This calls for future research grounded in nationally representative, religion-disaggregated primary data collection, together with longitudinal and intersectional designs capable of estimating causal effects. These findings have implications for social policy, constitutional jurisprudence, and the broader scholarship on caste-based stratification in post-colonial South Asia.