Cultural Issues in India

One of the issue India has is the caste system. Caste system is the world’s oldest social division rooted to the Indian society that based on occupation and it is hereditary. It divides people into main four clear hierarchical groups, Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and Shudras, and those castes were further divided into about 3,000 castes and 25,000 sub-castes. Besides that, there are people who cannot even belong to cast called “Atute” in other word “untouchables.” These people are considered to be dirty to be touched or seen, and are not treated as a human being.The discrimination against the people belonging to lower caste gets worse as the time passed.They aren’t allowed to use water from the same wells, go to the same temple or even get close to the people from the higher caste. Also, inter-caste marriage was prohibited. This caste system is preventing filling the income disparities which strongly relates to the India’s economic growth. Also, since people are put into the professions based on their birth cast instead of their ability, the caste system is preventing the improvements of the productivity in India. Caste is also making democracy difficult to implement. People tend to support the candidates who belong to same caste regardless is he or she qualified or not.

     The reason it is hard to get rid of the caste system is that it’s underlying the hinduism. In hinduism, there is a concept of reincarnation, and there is a saying that if you do your best in your present life, you can go up to the upper class in the afterlife, therefore eliminating the caste system means denying the Hindu faith itself. Since around 1947, the time of post-independence period, Indian government had started to tackle this issues by creating new laws and cooperating with social groups like NGO. 1950, government prohibited the discrimination based on the caste system, however, the caste system itself hasn’t abolished yet, and there are still about 160 million people are ranked as outcaste and getting sever discrimination. It looks like the abolition of caste system wouldn’t be in near future.  

    Gender inequality and the discrimination against women is the another cultural issue India has. In India, woman are not given equal rights as men in many aspects such as health, education and professions. Indian parents prefer to have male offsprings, and many female babies are aborted, abandoned, and deliberately neglected and underfed simply because they are girls. Girls get less food or poor quality food compared to boys, and the lack of protein input in their childhood casing developing problems for many adult woman in India. When they get sick, girls get less attention than boys and parents wouldn’t do anything until the symptom become serious. Also, the literacy rate of women is significantly low compared to men. In addition, women abuse has been a serious problem in India. Rape is actually the fourth most common crime against women in India. According to Amnesty International Report, 37,000 rape crime reported in 2014. In the Indian society where the police will do not do anything, nor will the perpetrator be punished, violence against women has been kept occurring in India for long times. Until recent years, there was a terrible custom called “Satie” which is when husband dies and be cremated, the wife also forced to kill herself by throwing herself on fire. Furthermore, the system called