Elucidate the basic premises of Davis' structural-functional theory of social stratification. How far is it relevant in understanding contemporary Indian society.

Basic premises

• Some positions are more functionally important and more scarce in qualified personnel.
• Society must motivate the talented to train and to occupy those positions.
• Unequal material and prestige rewards are the mechanism of motivation.
• Stratification is thus universal and functionally explained, not a historical accident.
• The theory is about positions, not about eternal families; mobility is thinkable.

Internal problems already named

• Melvin Tumin asked how we know importance except by the reward itself: tautology.
• Training can be blocked by property, caste, and gender, so the pool of talent is socially produced, not found.
• Dysfunctions: wasted talent, hostility, and the hiding of alternative motives such as service or coercion.
• Karl Marx: class is exploitation, not a team sorting nurses and CEOs for the common good.
• Max Weber: status honour and party power allocate reward beside “function”.
• Robert K. Merton: apparent functions can hide latent privilege.

Contemporary India: partial relevance

• Exam competition, IITs, and medical seats look like Davis–Moore contests for scarce skill.
• Public office and specialist medicine do need trained personnel; unequal pay is partly a labour-market fact.

Where relevance fails

• Caste and unpaid care, as Ann Oakley-type analysis shows, sort people before “talent” is measured.
• Informal labour is the majority: functionally crucial work, low reward, opposite of the premise.
• Mandal politics treats ascription as a claim on office, which the theory reads as interference rather than as a correction of blocked talent.
• Property and English-medium coaching sponsor mobility, Ralph Turner’s sponsored type, not a pure contest.
• NFHS nutrition and schooling gaps show that the talent pool is stratified in childhood.

How far

• Relevant as a folk ideology of merit and as a description of some professional labour markets.
• Weak as a general theory of Indian stratification, which remains a mix of class, caste status, and party, in Weber’s three orders, under a capitalist mode in Marx’s sense.