Understanding Marginalized Populations in India: Key Groups and Their Sustainability Challenges

India is home to extraordinary diversity – in language, culture, religion, and geography. But it is also home to deep and persistent inequalities. Across the country, millions of people are pushed to the margins of society because of their gender, caste, ethnicity, occupation, or religious identity. These marginalized groups face systemic barriers that deny them equal access to resources, rights, and opportunities. Understanding who these groups are, and why their struggles matter for sustainability, is essential for anyone studying or working in the field of sustainable development.

Women as a marginalized population in India 🔗

Despite significant legal protections and policy measures, women in India continue to face deep-rooted discrimination that manifests in stark demographic data. According to Census 2011 data released by the Government of India, the child sex ratio (ages 0-6 years) declined from 927 females per 1,000 males in 2001 to just 919 in 2011. This decline points to a troubling combination of sex-selective abortions, female infanticide, and neglect of the girl child – all driven by patrilineal customs that prize sons over daughters.

The reasons behind this skewed ratio are deeply cultural. Son preference is tied to beliefs that only sons can perform last rites, carry forward the family lineage, and support parents in old age. Exorbitant dowry demands further make daughters an economic burden in many families. When coupled with easy access to prenatal sex-determination technology, these attitudes have produced a persistent deficit of girls.

Beyond the sex ratio, women in India face a range of sustainability-related challenges. Maternal mortality, while declining, remains high compared to global standards. Access to healthcare, especially in rural areas, is limited. Research published in the National Institutes of Health confirms that gender discrimination leads to higher female child mortality in many regions, indicating ongoing neglect in healthcare and nutrition for girls.

Violence against women – from domestic abuse to communal conflicts – further entrenches their marginalization. Women caught in communal riots often lose homes, livelihoods, and family members. In everyday life, they face restrictions on mobility, education, and economic participation that limit their ability to contribute to or benefit from development processes.

Dalit communities: continuing marginalization despite constitutional guarantees 🔗

Dalits – a term meaning “broken” or “oppressed” – constitute roughly 17% of India’s population, or about 200 million people. Despite the Indian Constitution’s explicit abolition of untouchability and extensive affirmative action provisions, Dalits continue to experience systematic discrimination rooted in the caste system.

A study submitted to the United Nations Sustainable Development platform notes that Dalits face multiple forms of discrimination, violence, and exclusion based on their birth and traditional occupation. Literacy gaps between Dalit communities and other social groups remain wide, with Dalit women in rural areas facing especially low literacy rates. Education, employment, and political participation remain difficult for communities placed at the bottom of the caste hierarchy.

The sustainability implications are significant. Research on India’s sustainability challenges shows how caste mediates access to basic resources like clean water. Lower-caste communities often face physical barriers to accessing water sources, while in urban areas they are disproportionately concentrated in slums and peripheral zones where municipal water supply is irregular or nonexistent.

Dalit identity as a force for change 🔗

Over time, however, Dalit identity has evolved from a marker of oppression into a powerful symbol of resistance and aspiration. The Dalit movement has forged alliances with other marginalized groups – tribal communities, religious minorities, women’s collectives – to demand structural change. Dalit assertion now goes beyond caste alone; it represents a broader push for human rights, dignity, and equitable development.

Tribal populations and their struggle for land and resources 🔗

India’s tribal communities – officially known as Scheduled Tribes – number over 100 million, making it the largest tribal population in the world. These communities are deeply connected to their land, forests, and water sources, and their traditional lifestyles often embody principles of sustainable living. Yet they face relentless pressure from industrialization, urbanization, and corporate interests.

The Dongria Kondh and the Niyamgiri struggle 🔗

One of the most powerful examples of tribal resistance is the story of the Dongria Kondh, an indigenous community of around 8,000-10,000 people inhabiting the Niyamgiri Hills in Odisha. The Niyamgiri range is not just their home – it is a sacred landscape tied to their spiritual life, with the deity Niyam Raja believed to reside in its peaks.

In the early 2000s, UK-based mining giant Vedanta Resources sought to mine bauxite from the Niyamgiri Hills for its alumina refinery. Amnesty International described the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling – which gave the Dongria Kondh the final say over the mining project – as a landmark victory for indigenous rights in India. In a series of twelve village-level referendums (gram sabhas), every single village unanimously voted against the mining project. The Indian Ministry of Environment and Forests formally rejected Vedanta’s project in January 2014, affirming the primacy of tribal rights over corporate interests.

The Niyamgiri case became a global symbol of indigenous resistance, drawing support from organizations like Survival International and investors who divested from Vedanta. But the broader picture remains grim: across India, tribal communities continue to be displaced by mining projects, dam construction, and forest diversion, with their rights under the Forest Rights Act of 2006 frequently undermined.

Sentinelese and other isolated tribes 🔗

At the other extreme are communities like the Sentinelese of the Andaman Islands, one of the world’s last uncontacted peoples. Their very survival depends on being left alone. India’s tribal diversity – from the Sentinelese to the Dongria Kondh to the Gonds and Bhils – represents a vast spectrum of cultures, languages, and ecological knowledge systems that are increasingly threatened.

Unorganized workers in the liberalization era 🔗

India’s economic liberalization, which began in earnest in the 1990s, brought growth and global integration. But it also deepened the vulnerabilities of the country’s vast informal workforce. According to The Diplomat, citing ILO data, around 82% of India’s working women are concentrated in the informal sector – as domestic workers, home-based piece workers, construction labourers, street vendors, and agricultural hands.

Structural adjustment programs led to a process of contractualization and casualization, where permanent jobs with benefits were replaced by temporary, low-wage positions with no fixed pay, no health insurance, no maternity leave, and no pension. This shift hit women workers hardest, reinforcing their economic dependence while simultaneously pulling them into the workforce under exploitative conditions.

The Unorganized Workers’ Social Security Act of 2008 was a step toward recognition, but enforcement has been weak. Most women workers remain unaware of their legal rights, and the absence of formal contracts makes them vulnerable to arbitrary dismissal and wage theft. The result is a paradox: women form the backbone of India’s informal economy but enjoy virtually none of its protections.

Farmers facing multiple crises 🔗

Agriculture remains central to India’s economy and identity, yet farming has become an increasingly distressed occupation. The sector’s contribution to GDP has declined dramatically – from 56% in the early 1950s to around 15% today – while nearly half the workforce still depends on it for survival.

Analysis by Down To Earth based on 28 years of NCRB data reveals that at least 394,206 farmers and agricultural labourers died by suicide in India between 1995 and 2023. The crisis intensified after India joined the WTO in 1995, as reduced subsidies and increased imports weakened farm incomes for small producers. Maharashtra and Karnataka have consistently been the epicentres, with suicide rates roughly 2.5 times the national average.

Root causes of agrarian distress 🔗

The agrarian crisis is multi-layered. Land fragmentation means most farmers operate tiny, unviable holdings. Public investment in irrigation, agricultural research, and extension services has stagnated. Farmers are increasingly dependent on expensive inputs – seeds, fertilizers, pesticides – often purchased on credit from private moneylenders at exorbitant interest rates. A single crop failure due to erratic monsoons, pest attacks, or drought can push a family into an inescapable debt trap.

Research published in the Journal of Global Health confirms that socioeconomic factors – particularly indebtedness – rather than mental health problems are the primary drivers of farmer suicides. The withdrawal of state support during liberalization, combined with volatile markets and a changing climate, has made farming non-viable for millions. Government surveys have found that a significant proportion of Indian farmers would leave farming if they had any alternative livelihood option.

The consequences extend beyond individual tragedies. Distress migration from rural to urban areas creates new vulnerabilities, while regions with chronic agrarian failure become breeding grounds for extremism and social unrest.

Minority communities and their vulnerabilities 🔗

Religious minority communities in India face a distinct set of challenges that intersect with poverty, exclusion, and violence. Communal violence – such as the riots in Gujarat in 2002 and anti-Christian violence in Odisha’s Kandhamal district in 2008 – has caused displacement, loss of life, destruction of property, and long-term economic devastation for affected communities.

The aftermath of communal violence often leads to ghettoization, where minorities are forced into segregated neighbourhoods with poor infrastructure and limited economic opportunities. This spatial isolation compounds existing deprivation in education, employment, and political representation. For sustainability, the consequences are severe: displaced and ghettoized communities cannot participate meaningfully in local governance or development planning, and their exclusion undermines the social cohesion necessary for sustainable development.

Understanding marginalization: an intersectional approach 🔗

No single axis of identity – whether gender, caste, religion, ethnicity, or class – fully explains marginalization in India. A Dalit woman working as a construction labourer in the informal sector faces compounded disadvantages that are qualitatively different from those faced by an upper-caste man in formal employment, or even a Dalit man in the same sector. This is what scholars call intersectionality – the idea that multiple forms of discrimination overlap and reinforce each other.

India’s Constitution provides extensive guarantees: the abolition of untouchability, protections for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, fundamental rights to equality and non-discrimination, and directive principles aimed at social and economic justice. Yet the gap between constitutional promise and lived reality remains vast. Societal norms, cultural practices, political interests, and economic structures combine to perpetuate systematic deprivation.

Marginalization as a sustainability issue 🔗

Marginalization is not just a social justice concern – it is fundamentally a sustainability issue. When large sections of the population are denied access to clean water, food security, healthcare, education, and dignified work, the foundations of sustainable development are weakened. Research published in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization highlights how climate mitigation and adaptation measures in India sometimes disproportionately burden marginalized communities, further worsening their already vulnerable situation.

Tribal communities, for example, hold invaluable traditional ecological knowledge that is essential for biodiversity conservation and sustainable resource management. When they are displaced, this knowledge is lost. Women, who manage household food and water systems in most rural communities, are often excluded from the decision-making processes that determine how these resources are distributed. Farmers, who produce the food that sustains the nation, are driven to despair by policies that prioritize industrial growth over agricultural viability.

Addressing marginalization requires moving beyond piecemeal welfare schemes to structural reforms: land redistribution, genuine implementation of forest rights, strengthening of labour protections for informal workers, investment in public health and education for excluded communities, and – above all – an honest reckoning with the intersecting systems of power that produce and reproduce inequality.

What do you think? Can India achieve genuine sustainable development without first addressing the deep structural inequalities that marginalize women, Dalits, tribal communities, minorities, and informal workers? How can traditional ecological knowledge held by tribal communities be better integrated into mainstream sustainability policy?

References

1. https://www.pib.gov.in/newsite/printrelease.aspx?relid=103437
2. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5341607/
3. https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/11145Social%20exclusion%20and%20Inequality-Study%20by%20GCAP%20India%20.pdf
4. https://www.indiawaterportal.org/environment/ecology/indias-unique-sustainability-challenges
5. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2013/04/india-landmark-supreme-court-ruling-great-victory-indigenous-rights/
6. https://www.ritimo.org/Claiming-Niyamgiri-the-Dongria-Kondh-s-Struggle-against-Vedanta
7. https://thediplomat.com/2023/03/india-must-protect-the-150-million-women-in-the-informal-sector/
8. https://www.downtoearth.org.in/agriculture/farmer-suicides-in-india-what-28-years-of-data-shows
9. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7320464/
10. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9874371/