Professor Marc Galanter resources

Prof Marc Galanter is one of the foremost scholars on Indian backward classes including constitutional, legal, and social issues. Marc Galanter was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Delhi, a Fellow of the American Institute of Indian Studies and consultant on legal services to the Ford Foundation in India. He is the author of the best book on this subject “Competing Equalities: Law and the Backward Classes in India”. He is currently at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

I have been reading Prof Marc Galanter’s online work about OBCs, law and caste in India, and about Competing Equalities in general. I just wanted to share this excellent resource with all.

• Professor Marc Galanter is highly cited and has won awards the world over. See here
• His home page http://www.marcgalanter.net – there are a ton of links from here to his works
• Read the following (these PDFs are scanned so they are huge 5-10MB each so patience please – they are worth it):
  • Who are the other backward classes ? (1978) A “must read”
  • The Long Half-Life of reservations (2002) Read this !
  • Many more excellent links at this page
  • Parts of his book “Competing Equalities” at questia here 

While we are reading – here is another resource for you.

A symposium called india-seminar conducted in 2005 called “Redressing Disadvantages” . It has links to a lot of material on this subject.

Every social scientist as well as government agencies themselves (NCBC and Planning Commission) have pointed out that lack of even basic data about OBC castes make it hard to judge their effectiveness or assess their real backwardness.