People of India have primordial loyalties towards caste and community. At times they become the source of violent conflicts. No wonder, certain sections suffer from discrimination. Thus from the beginning, the government of independent India adopted a policy of affirmative action. This lead to reservation in government jobs and seats in schools and colleges for Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST), separately in proportion to their population. However, since caste was a local phenomenon, no all-India standards could capture or do justice to complex reality of caste.

Right from the beginning there was a feeling that there are many castes/groups which do not come under either SC or ST but are lagging behind and require special assistance. Eventually, in 1980, government accepted the reality of Other Backward Classes (OBC), and the recommendations of the Second Backward Classes Commission (Agrawal and Aggarwal, 1991). Then 27 percent jobs in the central services were reserved for the OBC. Some years later it was followed by reservation of seats in the colleges, universities and professional institutions.

In this backdrop, the Eleventh Five Year Plan went for the concept of inclusionary growth (Planning Commission, 2008). According to the Eleventh Five Year Plan the following groups/regions/sectors need special schemes for inclusion: social groups divided into four categories of Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, Other Backward Classes, and Others; minorities, particularly Muslims; eleven special category states comprising seven North Eastern states, Jammu & Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, and Uttarakhand; women and children; agriculture sector; old population; street children; physically challenged; and drug addicts. The plan aims at promotion of education and health among all the social groups, equal participation of all in the government jobs, meeting special needs of each group, and reducing inequalities. A serious reading of the draft shows that the concept of social groups has become most crucial to development plan. In this context, sociologists would like to study all population parameters according to the social groups identified in the Plan. The different social groups in India are passing through different transitions. While some are passing through the first demographic transition, others are passing through the second demographic transition in which fertility declines rapidly to the below replacement level.