Revision summary
New inequalities grow around private school, health, and metro work. Informal labour is the structure of that split. Acute poverty remains landless, Adivasi, Dalit, and female-headed. Illness and displacement turn poverty sharp. Transformation must join growth to rights in land, wage, and care.
Model answer
Introduction
Social transformation in India now meets new inequalities of skill, city, and private service, together with acute poverty that is no longer only a village calorie story. The challenge is dual: glittering growth and a leftover India.
Body
Emerging inequalities
- Post-1991 private education and health split capabilities, which Sen would call unfreedom beside GDP.
- Formal cores with informal peripheries, as Breman’s labour shows, create a two-speed workplace.
- Digital, English, and metro rents add a spatial class. Beteille’s disharmony is now mall versus basti.
Acute poverty
- Landless Dalit and Adivasi households, displaced peasants, and female-headed families remain in depth poverty, which SECC-type counts still catch.
- Urban slum poverty is cash-poor and service-poor at once.
- Feminization of poverty and missing social security make illness an acute trap.
Challenge for transformation
- Sanskritization and planning-era mobility do not map these forms.
- Transformation fails if it is only a larger middle class on a caste-informal base.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD LB[Liberalisation] --> IQ[Private skill metro split] LN[Land caste gender] --> AP[Acute poverty] IQ --> CH[Challenge of transformation] AP --> CH
Conclusion
Emerging inequality is credential, metro, and informal dualism. Acute poverty is still caste-land-gender. Social transformation must treat both, or growth will only rearrange the queue.
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