A Rural Economist's Long Apprenticeship in Data
Dr. Abusaleh Shariff, the economist and statistician who built the empirical backbone of the Sachar Committee report, traces his relationship with Hindu-Muslim comparison to a childhood that had almost nothing to do with religion. Born in 1952 in a remote part of Karnataka, he grew up the son of an Urdu-medium schoolteacher who insisted his son also attend the local Kannada-language primary school, walking between the two and taking his morning meal at the home of a Hindu farming family near the school. "Not even one second in my life was I alert that I am a Muslim," he says of those years, describing a village world where Hindu and Muslim children studied, ate and played together, even as caste hierarchies separately kept Dalit families out of temples and other spaces.
That early, unselfconscious fluency across Kannada, Urdu and English shaped his entire career. His first job, in 1974, was as a door-to-door survey investigator for an independent research institute in Karnataka, collecting household data the way census enumerators do. Because he could read and write Kannada, unlike most Muslim colleagues who could only speak it, he moved through Dalit, Brahmin and Muslim households alike, watching first-hand which children were in school during class hours and which were absent, minding stalls or running errands.
It was in that fieldwork, in the early-to-mid 1970s, that Shariff began building tables of household data broken out by religion, at a time when government surveys mainly used Hindu-Muslim categories to track fertility differentials, a politically charged demographic question of that era. Curiosity about his own community's education and income levels, he says, pushed him to keep separating out Muslim data long after the fertility debate had cooled. His first Hindu-Muslim comparative paper, on widow remarriage patterns, was written when he was in his early twenties and presented at a seminar hosted by a prominent Karnataka temple trust, whose head awarded him a silver medal for it — a moment he still cites as evidence that rigorous, apolitical use of data draws a hearing even on subjects Indians are told not to discuss.
The Op-Ed That Reached the Prime Minister's Desk
Shariff's 1996 article in the Economic and Political Weekly, comparing socio-economic and demographic indicators between Hindus and Muslims, was, he says, the first such comparison published in independent India. It circulated widely enough in academic circles that Harvard's Kennedy School invited him to lecture within three months of publication. A related 1999 Human Development Report chapter, commissioned by the Planning Commission and released by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, carried Hindu-Muslim comparisons on nearly every page — and Shariff says Vajpayee personally endorsed the approach at the book's release, even though the government's own official data categories did not change.
The more consequential intervention came in 2005, when Shariff published an op-ed in the Times of India rebutting inflammatory claims then circulating about Muslim fertility — the familiar trope of "four wives, twenty-four children" — and challenging the government to release a white paper drawing honestly on the demographic data it already held. The same evening, his home phone rang: it was the Prime Minister's Office. Shariff was received by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, escorted by then Joint Secretary Javed Usmani, and over coffee the two discussed setting up a body to examine the question systematically. That conversation became the origin of what would be known as the Sachar Committee, chaired by Justice Rajinder Sachar.
Assembling the Committee, Chasing the Data
The panel Shariff describes was a high-level committee constituted on the Prime Minister's directive rather than a statutory body mandated by Parliament, which meant its recommendations, however extensive, were not automatically binding on government. Its members included the economist Rakesh Basant of IIM Ahmedabad, who reviewed the statistical work; the sociologist T.K. Oommen; the statistician Abdul Basit; and Syed Hamid, then chancellor of Jamia Hamdard. Azra Razzack, a Jamia Millia Islamia professor, contributed a chapter on the internal social stratification within Muslim communities, including caste-like divisions between so-called ashraf and non-ashraf groups, and another on access to banking.
Gathering the data took the committee to nearly every ministry and state government. Shariff recalls that Gujarat, then led by Chief Minister Narendra Modi, was the first state to supply its data; West Bengal was the last, arriving only after he threatened to say publicly on television that the state was withholding information. The most contentious request went to the armed forces, seeking figures on Muslim representation in enlistment — a request that drew objections reaching the President's office and then-Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee, who told Shariff formally that the data would not be released, though he says it eventually reached him informally regardless.
Shariff describes numbers, once rigorously aggregated, as carrying a kind of evidentiary finality that makes them almost impossible to argue away. It is that quality, he suggests, that explains why the report survived nearly two decades of political turbulence largely intact: critics have repeatedly threatened to "reject" its findings, but none, he says, has ever produced a competing dataset to refute them.
A Report Nobody Formally Withdrew
The Sachar Committee report was tabled in Parliament and accepted, and Shariff is emphatic that it has never been formally rejected since, even after the 2014 change in government. He points out that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has cited a later, related report by the economist Amitabh Kundu three times, and that when the BJP government abolished instant triple talaq, it framed the move as advancing women's empowerment rather than repudiating anything in the Sachar findings. "Nobody has said it is appeasement," he says of official positions on the report, distinguishing that from rhetoric heard "on the road." The document, he notes, remains posted on a government website and technically still pending consideration within the ministry that received it — neither implemented in full nor withdrawn.
Reception among other marginalised communities was not uniformly hostile, either. Shariff recalls the Dalit leader Ramdas Athawale garlanding him after the report's release, pleased that comparative Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe data — folded in for comparison though the committee's mandate was specifically about Muslims — gave Dalit groups a fresh reference point of their own.
Unsettling the Hindu-Muslim Binary
Running through the conversation is a broader argument about how Indian society is actually organised, one Shariff concedes puts him at odds with much of Indian sociology. Drawing on the sociologist M.N. Srinivas's concept of Sanskritisation — the process by which lower castes historically emulated upper-caste practice to assert social standing — Shariff argues that Muslims, in practice, occupy a position within India's caste-inflected social hierarchy rather than outside it, even though Islam theologically rejects caste distinctions. In the rural India where roughly two-thirds of the population still lives, he says, Hindu and Muslim life has long been "intermeshed": shared labour, shared markets, shared neighbourhoods, interrupted by caste-based exclusion of Dalits from temples and similar spaces, but not by a sharp religious partition of everyday life.
That sharp Hindu-Muslim binary, he argues, is a comparatively recent political construction rather than a historical rural reality — one he attributes to organised political movements built around communal mobilisation. He extends the argument to the idea of public space: access to a street, a market, a bank or a school, he says, is constitutionally guaranteed to everyone, yet selectively denied in practice, pointing to municipal rules in Delhi barring battery-rickshaws from certain roads as one small, present-day example of how access is quietly rationed.
He locates the deeper policy failure in how government data itself was categorised from the early 1970s onward: statisticians, interpreting constitutional protections for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, built survey and census categories that separated only SC/ST populations from "all others," treating the remaining population — including Muslims — as uniformly equal and therefore not requiring separate tracking. Shariff calls this a "systemic bias" built quietly into India's data architecture, one that runs alongside a comparable but less politicised gender bias, and argues it left Muslim deprivation statistically invisible for decades before Sachar.
What the Village Data Showed About Women
Some of Shariff's most striking claims rest on decades of village-level fieldwork comparing household decision-making by Hindu and Muslim women. He argues that Muslim women in the households he studied exercised more immediate autonomy — deciding on their own, for instance, to rush an injured child to a doctor, or eating a meal without waiting for a husband to return — patterns he attributes to Muslim households being more often nuclear and less tied to joint land-owning family structures than many Hindu households in the same villages. He is careful to frame the comparison as drawn from his own fieldwork rather than universal doctrine, and pairs it with an account of Muslim widow remarriage rates that he found, in the 1970s, to be markedly higher than among Hindu widows in the same districts — a finding, again, that won him recognition rather than censure from the Hindu temple audience he first presented it to.
He offers these findings less as a comparative ranking than as a caution against reading Muslim social conservatism purely through symbols like the veil, arguing that formal markers of modesty coexist, in his data, with considerable practical agency inside the household.
Why Shariff Says No to Quotas
When the Sachar Committee's headline findings — Muslim representation of roughly four percent in competitive examinations and elite institutions against a population share nearer fifteen percent — became public, they triggered street demonstrations in Delhi explicitly demanding reservation, even though the report itself, Shariff insists, never used the word quota. As an economist, he argues that reservation would function as a private good, benefiting only the small number of individuals who secure one of a shrinking pool of government jobs, rather than a public good capable of lifting the community broadly, given that most employment now sits outside government service altogether.
He also complicates the underrepresentation figure itself, noting that part of the four percent reflects lower application rates among Muslim candidates rather than lower success rates once they apply — a supply-side as much as a demand-side problem, in his framing, that quotas would not by themselves resolve.
In place of quotas, Shariff points to two structural recommendations from the report: a Diversity Index that would measure the religious and social composition of institutions, cities or districts, paired with tax concessions or funding incentives for organisations that score well on it, rewarding integration rather than mandating set-asides; and an Equal Opportunity Commission, a recommendation elaborated in a related report by the late jurist N.R. Madhava Menon, intended as a standing, data-driven forum for adjudicating opportunity rather than a one-time redistribution.
He is equally insistent on grassroots measures: attaching anganwadi child-care centres to mosques, steering Muslim children toward government rather than private schooling, publicising government skill-development schemes that he says remain largely unused in Muslim neighbourhoods for want of outreach, and repurposing mosque platforms — currently devoted, in his telling, mostly to centuries-old sermon formats — toward practical community development messaging, including bringing women into more active roles beyond the household.
An Unfinished Mandate
Looking back, Shariff describes the Sachar Committee's roughly two years of work less as the drafting of a fixed document than as an extended "debating platform," one that forced a rare, politically unmediated consensus among its members on data that Indian public life had avoided confronting directly for decades. Its hundred-odd recommendations, he says, were signed off by every member without political interference — an intellectual consensus, in his words, that stands apart from how government reports are usually produced.
He notes that several of the report's structural proposals, the Equal Opportunity Commission chief among them, have still not been implemented, nearly two decades on. He also mentions, more briefly, that he has since applied similar data-driven methods to reports on Indian Christians in the United States, briefed to the Biden administration ahead of a prime ministerial visit, which he credits with a subsequent lull in attacks on Christian communities — a claim offered as his own reading of events rather than an established fact. Asked about present-day controversies, he compares the ongoing special intensive revision of electoral rolls to "a wolf in sheep's clothing" and warns that a nationally applied citizenship framework of the kind debated around the Citizenship Amendment Act would put every Indian, not only Muslims, at risk of bureaucratic exclusion. The throughline, for Shariff, is the same one that drove him to a village doorstep with a survey form fifty years ago: without reliable, disaggregated data, deprivation simply does not show up on the page — and what does not show up on the page is easy for policy to ignore.
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