Why the Sachar Committee Report Is Still Relevant Today | Dr. Abusaleh Shariff

A Village Childhood That Never Felt Communal

Abusaleh Shariff, the economist whose data work underpins the Sachar Committee report, was born in 1952 in a remote part of rural Karnataka. His father, an Urdu-school teacher, insisted he also attend the local Kannada-medium primary school — a decision none of the other Muslim families in the area made for their children. Shariff has described a punishing but formative routine: up at dawn, a two-kilometre walk to the Kannada school, then on to the Urdu school that started at eleven, with breakfast eaten most mornings at the home of a Hindu farming family in the village. He came out of that childhood, he told Nous host Ali, fluent in three languages and, more importantly, without ever having felt himself to be a religious minority. Not even, in his own words, one percent of him carried that awareness — a contrast, he was careful to note, with what many other Muslim children of his generation experienced.

Learning to Count What Nobody Counted

That biography matters because it explains how Shariff ended up as India's most prolific chronicler of Hindu-Muslim socio-economic disparity. After his master's degree in economics — earned, he says, despite mediocre grades — he joined a research institute that sent him door to door across Karnataka villages in the early 1970s, collecting household survey data on income, land, health and education, moving without hesitation between Dalit homes, Brahmin homes and Muslim homes. It was on those visits, walking through a Muslim locality during school hours, that he noticed something the data alone hadn't yet shown him: streets full of children who should have been in class. In a neighbouring, mixed-caste locality at the same hour, the street was empty because every child was inside a classroom. The government, he concluded, had never built the outreach programmes needed to enrol Muslim children the way it had for others — a failure of supply, not proof of a community's lack of demand for education.

The Column That Was Never Drawn

Later, while compiling government-commissioned survey tables, Shariff kept running into the same structural blind spot. India's data systems had a constitutionally mandated column for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, and then a single undifferentiated category for everyone else — "all others." The logic, as it was explained to him, was that the constitution guaranteed equality to all citizens, so no other community needed a separate column. In practice, that interpretation of equality made Muslim deprivation statistically invisible for decades. It was simply never asked, he told Ali, whether Muslim children's education levels, income and health outcomes needed separate tracking at all.

Publishing the Unspeakable Comparison

Shariff broke that silence in 1996, publishing what he describes as the first article in independent India's history to directly compare Hindu and Muslim populations across economic, educational and political indicators — a piece that took him roughly a decade of quiet spadework to complete. He recalls colleagues warning him to be careful with language that placed "Hindu" and "Muslim" side by side in the same academic sentence, for fear of offending either community. He kept doing it anyway, arguing the debate was academic, not religious. One early finding surprised even the temple organisation that invited him to present it in Karnataka: that by several measures of protection and status within the family, Muslim women fared no worse — and on some counts better — than Hindu women. He was given a silver medal for the paper.

A Consistent, Twenty-Five-Point Gap

Running male-female comparisons across his tables throughout the 1970s, Shariff kept finding a gap of roughly 20 to 25 percentage points between men and women — a gap that held steady whether the household was Hindu or Muslim, once Dalit households were separated out. That, he argues, is what a genuine systemic bias looks like: a gender gap embedded across Indian society regardless of religion, but one that never became a matter of national political controversy the way Muslim deprivation did. India, he told Ali, has carried two structural biases side by side — one of gender, one against a religious minority — and only the second was ever turned into a political weapon.

How the Sachar Committee Came to Him

By the time Prime Minister Manmohan Singh convened the committee that would carry Justice Rajinder Sachar's name, Shariff's decades of quiet data work had already made him the obvious person to call. He recalls Singh inviting him to his home personally, telling him the report "has to be data-oriented" and leaning on his expertise as, in Shariff's own recollection, "an expert data person." He describes the resulting 2006 report as unlike anything published before or since in Indian nation-building: a document built entirely on verifiable numbers, submitted to and formally accepted by Parliament.

"Nobody Has Said It Is Appeasement"

Shariff pushes back hard on the accusation, now routine in Indian political discourse, that the Sachar report amounted to Muslim "appeasement." No government, he points out, has ever formally rejected the report on its merits — doing so, he argues, would require producing a rival body of data and proving the original numbers wrong, something no administration has attempted. He notes that Narendra Modi has referenced a later, BJP-era assessment of the Sachar findings, authored by demographer Amitabh Kundu, on three separate occasions. "Nobody has said it is appeasement," he told Ali flatly — the practical objection has instead come through separate policy moves, like the abolition of instant triple talaq, framed as corrections rather than rebuttals. He also cites a 2013 Gujarat government submission to the Supreme Court arguing that the report's Muslim-specific categorisation was itself unconstitutional — a challenge Shariff says has never been resolved, and one he says he is fully prepared to defend, given that the underlying work was done by some of the country's most credentialed researchers.

An Unfinished Argument

Two questions, Shariff told Ali, remain genuinely open nearly two decades on: why India's constitutional framers, who debated minority deprivation extensively during the freedom movement and the Constituent Assembly debates, still allowed that structural blindness to persist in post-Independence policy design — and whether the exclusion built into government data categories was, in his own phrase, "intentional or accidental." He promised, in the portion of the conversation captured here, to return to that question in his conclusion. What is clear from everything preceding it is his conviction that the answer will not be a comfortable one for the institutions that built those categories in the first place.