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A few days ago, a video surfaced on the internet, seemingly recorded by a cab driver who had four passengers in his cab whom he had found through the ride-hailing platform Rapido. The video showed him asking them to leave after they used casteist slurs while speaking about one of their seniors. The cab driver, Ankit Kumar, mentioned how he had objected to the repeated use of such language and eventually stopped the cab, asking them to leave. The passengers were employees of the Indian Railways. A few days later, the platform responded by suspending Ankit’s account for “99 years and 11 months,” while the passengers faced no action, from either the platform or their employers, the Indian Railways, which is yet to release a public statement even acknowledging the incident.

It is worth mentioning that the incident is contested, with media houses arguing for a counter-narrative that the video was staged by the cab driver, who misused the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, and that the passengers themselves belonged to the SC, ST and Other Backward Classes (OBC) communities. While the identities as well as the intent of the passengers cannot be confirmed yet, the video shared by the cab driver and Rapido’s decision to suspend the cab driver are incontestable facts so far.

If you look at the event without taking into consideration the reach of the video, the fact remains that most people are employed in the private sector, which has no mechanism to deal with caste-based discrimination, be it the informal labour force or corporates. On the other hand, if a public-sector employee faces such discrimination, their employers are legally bound to carry out a grievance redressal mechanism and the public sector also has affirmative action policies. Ankit works for a platform that hesitates to even recognise him as a worker and the community guidelines followed by the ride-hailing platform, as well as its competitors, process misconduct and safety issues in ways where the idea of addressing caste disappears. But looking away from a problem does not mean that it ceases to exist.

A public-sector architecture, however imperfect

The protections against discrimination on the grounds of caste were built with the state in mind, and their extension into the realm of private corporations was overlooked. The Indian constitution abolished untouchability through Article 17, which made it a punishable offence, followed by the Protection of Civil Rights Act, 1955, which gave the abolition criminal teeth. When the existing legislation turned out to be ineffective in addressing caste violence, the Scheduled Castes and the........

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