India's preferential policies: migrants, the middle classes, and ethnic equality

This book describes and assesses India's efforts to use preferential policies to achieve greater equality among ethnic and provincial groups. It focuses particularly on those preferential policies intended to improve the position of the local population in relation to migrants from other cultural-linguistic regions of the country.

The first three chapters provide an overview of the subject, review the legislative history of preferential policies and discuss the way in which the judiciary has attempted to resolve various constitutional problems that have arisen from them. The next three chapters present a history and analysis of policies in Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Assam. Drawing from the case studies, the authors comment on and assess the political calculations that policy-makers must make as they deliberate over preferential policies, revealing, in the process, the results of such policies.