[olliej]

Uh, no it’s not?

You can [and people do] use family names as an effective proxy for caste, and if you’re planning on discriminating on caste that’s more than enough. The Dalit's (in the case of Cisco) are not all the same "village" as the people they're claiming are discriminating against, and it's bizarre you would think that clusters of immigrants from a country of a billion people would magically already know each other.

I know of people who through marriage had their family name change from a lower caste to a higher one, and experience an immediate drop in questions of the “how could you get here?” Form.

More to the point: if it were already impossible to discriminate based on caste then this law would not impact anyone.

[dooraven]

Yeah maybe in North India.

South India it's pretty impossible, since it went through the self respect movements and basically got rid of surnames. Most south indians have surnames based on their fathers names.

But it is definitely common to use surnames as proxies in North Indian communities (unfortunately)

[huytersd]

You don’t have to “magically” know each other, you just have to know what the last name implies. What I’m saying is that knowledge is very locally specific.