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My experience, as an outsider who used to visit colleagues in India regularly, is that it's quite prevalent but very tricky to talk about. It's an understandably sensitive topic. There's obviously a lot of variation, both according to a person's own position within that structure and (I've heard) different parts of the country. Nonetheless, it's hard to miss the visible differences between the people working in a tech office and the people cleaning it, or the people doing manual construction labor, or the people begging. And it's not much harder to notice how they interact with each other. It's also hard to dismiss caste as an ongoing issue when you find out that all but two out of 50+ engineers you worked with is Brahmin. (I only found that out through the one colleague who was close enough and open-minded enough to discuss such things with me BTW.) Ditto when you find out that one of those two exceptions had been repeatedly passed over for promotion despite being twice as skilled as some of those who were promoted. Once you start looking, the patterns become clear. When considering these issues from outside, though, it's important to realize how entangled they are with another aspect of Indian culture: high context. Even among people of the same caste, there's a strong idea of social position and "right behavior" with respect to that. Whenever we very-senior Americans came to visit, the jockeying over who was invited to meetings and who was allowed to speak in them was almost comical. Often, the person speaking was clearly unfamiliar with work that had been done by someone more junior. That was considered quite normal. There was also a darker side. On two separate occasions, people I had formed strong working relationships with were completely shunned by most of their local colleagues because they were perceived as "jumping the queue" by associating with me. After that, I started paying attention to these relationships. If I wanted to speak directly with the junior person who had actually done some work, I made sure to do it as discreetly (even secretively) as possible. I wouldn't mention it to their status-conscious seniors; instead I'd send feedback directly to top-level people who did their reviews and knew how to handle such sensitive communication properly. Please note that I'm not criticizing Indians here. Having seen how my fellow Americans treat "outsiders" even without an ancient caste system, I doubt that many of them would do better within one. But there are definitely differences in social behavior (the "never say 'no'" thing is another) that anyone working with many Indians either in India or elsewhere would do well to learn. |
This is not unbelievable but this large a number is quite surprising. 48/50 from various "upper castes" is quite common though.
Nepotism is rampant though, not unbelievable.