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Picture this scene. An organisation runs a DEI workshop. The slides cover gender representation, LGBTQIA+ inclusion, disability access, and mental wellness. The facilitator asks participants to reflect on who might be experiencing barriers in their workplace. The responses are thoughtful. The conversation is rich.
Nobody mentions caste.
Nobody mentions class.
The workshop closes. The participants leave. And two employees quietly sit with the knowledge that the longest axis of disadvantage in their lives, the one that shaped which school they attended, which network they could access, which accent they learned to lose, was never named.
This is not a fringe failure. It is the norm in Indian corporate DEI.
What India’s DEI Framework Has Chosen to Focus On
Over the last decade, Indian workplaces have made genuine progress on some dimensions of inclusion. Gender representation has moved from invisible to a board-level conversation. LGBTQIA+ inclusion gained institutional traction after the Supreme Court’s 2018 reading down of Section 377. Disability rights have been codified more clearly under the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016. Mental health has entered the HR vocabulary, albeit unevenly.
These are real advances. They should not be minimised.
But they have been accomplished within a framework that is largely imported, primarily from Western DEI practice, and applied to India with selective adaptation. The Western DEI model was built to address race, gender, sexual orientation, and disability. India used it as a template, swapped race for gender, and left the rest largely unchanged.
What it left out: caste and class, the two axes of disadvantage that are most specifically and consequentially Indian.
A 2024 investigation by Scroll found that of more than a thousand employers surveyed across ten sectors in India, only 21% had instituted formal DEI policies. And within those policies, interviews with Dalit Bahujan Adivasi professionals and DEI specialists consistently revealed the same pattern: DEI work in Indian workplaces focuses on the inclusion of women and queer persons and, to a lesser extent, people with disabilities. Caste and religion, two key axes along which individuals and communities are marginalised in India, are largely disregarded in how DEI is conceptualised in Indian workplaces.
The Meritocracy Myth That Protects the Status Quo
The private sector’s position on caste is simple and largely unstated: merit determines outcomes here. The office is a level playing field. Whatever hierarchies existed outside, they are dissolved at the door.
This claim does not survive evidence.
In the most comprehensive correspondence study of private sector hiring in India, Sukhadeo Thorat and Paul Attewell sent identical CVs, with identical qualifications, to the same job listings, distinguishing applicants only by name signals, marking some as upper-caste Hindu and others as Dalit or Muslim. Dalit and Muslim applicants received significantly fewer callbacks than identically qualified upper-caste Hindu applicants. Discrimination did not arise after education failed. It operated before education could be rewarded.
A subsequent study by Siddique (2011) found that discrimination was especially pronounced in private sector firms, in certain sectors, and when recruiters were male and upper-caste. Madheswaran and Attewell, extending the evidence to wages, found that the largest component of the observed wage gap between SC workers and others was not explained by qualification differences. It was explained by what economists call “discrimination,” the portion of the gap that cannot be accounted for by any measurable difference in productivity or credentials.
These findings were published years ago. They have not materially changed the way Indian corporations discuss hiring.
Class: The Invisible Axis That Shapes Everything
Caste and class are not the same thing, though they are deeply intertwined in the Indian context. Class disadvantage, even where caste is not the primary factor, operates through its own set of mechanisms that most DEI frameworks fail to capture.
A first-generation professional, someone who is the first in their family to enter a white-collar corporate career, arrives without what we might call the professional operating system: the tacit knowledge of how office culture works, how to network, how to perform in interviews, which opportunities are announced publicly and which are filled quietly through relationships, what “executive presence” actually means and how it is coded, how to negotiate a salary, how to advocate for a promotion.
Research by the Boston Consulting Group found that first-generation professionals are nearly 50% less likely to have access to networks that help them navigate, get on, and climb the corporate ladder. A study in the Journal of Career Assessment noted that the challenges faced by first-generation students in education, including limited access to networks, fewer opportunities for professional development, and feelings of exclusion, follow them directly into the workplace.
In India, this disadvantage is compounded by language. English fluency in the corporate world is not just a communication skill. It functions as a class signal. Accent, vocabulary, and comfort in English-medium settings are often used as proxies for capability or “culture fit,” making them filters that systematically disadvantage candidates from regional-medium schooling backgrounds, regardless of their actual ability.
The person who went to an English-medium school in a major city, whose parents had professional careers, who had family friends who could explain how an internship works, who could practise job interviews with people who had done them before, does not experience this as privilege. They experience it as normal. That normalisation is exactly the problem.
What “Access” Actually Means in an Indian Workplace Context
The August DEI calendar’s “Access Ladder” exercise asks participants to step up or down based on access to schooling, professional networks, language, and safety. It is a carefully constructed prompt because it names the dimensions of access without requiring participants to name caste explicitly. This is deliberate.
Naming caste directly in a corporate setting in India carries real complexity. Some employees may not wish to disclose their caste identity in a professional context. Some may fear that disclosure will trigger the very bias the exercise is trying to surface. Some organisations have not built the psychological safety needed to hold that conversation without it becoming harmful. And data on employee caste is genuinely sensitive under Indian privacy law, where it constitutes a special category that requires specific conditions for collection and use.
The Access Ladder sidesteps these sensitivities while still illuminating what actually shapes differential access to opportunity. When an employee reflects that they did not go to an English-medium school, did not have parents who could explain how corporate hiring works, did not have family members in professional networks who could make introductions, the exercise is making structural disadvantage visible without requiring anyone to name its source.
But for organisations that are ready for the more direct conversation, the access framework can be taken further. The Scroll investigation found that one DEI professional, when asked why their organisation did not address caste in their DEI work, said: “I learned that there is no general consensus and no policy documents on how to implement caste diversity.” That absence of consensus is not neutral. It means the question is simply not being asked, and the silence is inherited and passed on.
The Legal and Compliance Floor Is Not the Same as Inclusion
Indian law does address caste discrimination. The Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 criminalises specified forms of caste-based discrimination and violence. The Constitution prohibits untouchability. Reservation policies apply across public sector employment and public educational institutions.
But private sector employment is largely outside mandatory reservation frameworks. The legal floor in private employment is the prohibition of discrimination, not affirmative representation. And the legal floor is not the same as inclusion.
Many Indian organisations operating in the ESG reporting space are beginning to grapple with this. A 2024 analysis in the Indian Review of Corporate and Commercial Laws noted that while SEBI’s Business Responsibility and Sustainability Report (BRSR) framework mandates certain diversity disclosures, those disclosures currently require data on gender and disability but not on caste or socio-economic background. The case for expanding those disclosures is gaining ground, but the data infrastructure does not yet exist in most private organisations.
Meanwhile, Apple and Cisco have already explicitly added caste as a protected category in their global employee conduct policies, according to MIT Sloan Management Review. A handful of Indian subsidiaries of multinational firms have followed. Most Indian-origin organisations have not.
What Organisations Can Actually Do
This is not a call for private sector reservation, a proposal that carries its own legal, operational, and political complexity. It is a call for organisations to honestly map where they are and what they are missing.
Expand how you define DEI data. Without data on socio-economic background and first-generation professional status, organisations cannot see what they do not know. Collecting this data requires consent, anonymisation, and clear purpose. But its absence means that patterns of structural disadvantage remain permanently invisible. Start with voluntary, anonymised surveys that ask about educational background, parental occupation, and whether employees were the first in their families to enter corporate employment. This is class data that most employees will share without the complexity of caste disclosure.
Audit what “culture fit” is actually measuring. When hiring managers reject candidates for “poor communication skills” or “not a great culture fit,” ask what those phrases mean specifically. In many cases, they are proxies for accent, social comfort, or familiarity with professional norms that are entirely learnable but were never taught to candidates from certain backgrounds. Building structured interviews with defined evaluation criteria reduces the surface area for this kind of coded discrimination.
Design access into professional development, not just diversity hiring. Bringing first-generation professionals in through the door and then failing to provide mentorship, sponsorship, and explicit guidance on unwritten professional norms is inclusion in name only. Structured mentorship programmes, transparent promotion criteria, and sponsorship from senior leaders who actively advocate for high-potential employees from non-traditional backgrounds all matter.
Run the Access Ladder exercise and do not treat it as the destination. The exercise is a powerful opener. It makes structural disadvantage tangible and personal in a way that abstract DEI frameworks rarely do. But an exercise alone does not change hiring patterns, promotion criteria, or the social dynamics of whose ideas get heard in a meeting. The value of the exercise is what it generates: questions that the organisation can choose to sit with or choose to answer.
Name what the Access Ladder is pointing at. For organisations that have built sufficient psychological safety and have thought carefully about how to hold the conversation, making space to name caste and class directly, not as accusation but as structural analysis, is the next step. This requires trained facilitation, careful framing, and explicit commitments about how what is shared will and will not be used. But it is possible, and organisations that have done it consistently report that it creates the kind of genuine dialogue that generic DEI workshops rarely reach.
The Uncomfortable Centre of the Conversation
Indian DEI’s avoidance of caste and class is not random. It reflects something real about the demographics of who builds DEI programmes, who approves them, and who has historically benefited from keeping workplace meritocracy as an unexamined premise.
The people who design corporate DEI in India are, on average, more likely to come from backgrounds of relative structural advantage. They have not personally experienced the closed doors that field studies on caste-based hiring discrimination document. This does not make them indifferent to injustice. But it does shape which injustices feel urgent and which feel distant.
The Access Ladder works because it invites people to locate themselves within a structural picture that most DEI conversations present only from the outside. When a participant steps back on access to schooling, steps back on professional networks, steps back on language safety, and looks around the room, they are not looking at data. They are looking at the room.
Organisations that are serious about building inclusive cultures in the Indian context will eventually have to engage with what that room is telling them.
Kelp supports organisations in designing DEI programmes that are genuinely grounded in Indian workplace realities, including structured facilitation of exercises like the Access Ladder, deeper DEI advisory engagements, and Culture Sensitization workshops that hold space for the conversations Indian workplaces have historically avoided.
If your organisation is ready to move past the gender-and-disability default and engage with the fuller picture of what inclusion means in India, we would welcome the conversation.
Reach out at info@kelphr.com, call 95001 29652, or visit www.kelphr.com.
