Haryana: Society and Social Issues

What the official syllabus says

General Studies-I (Paper III), Main Written Examination:

• Related issues of Haryana.

The same line closes General Studies-II and General Studies-III, where it covers Haryana’s polity, governance, economy, agriculture, environment and security. The Preliminary Examination’s General Studies paper has:

• Haryana-Economy and people. Social, economic and culture institutions and language of Haryana.

In General Studies-I, “related issues of Haryana” means the Haryana side of this paper’s subjects: the state’s history, art and culture, society and geography. This page covers one of them.

Topics in detail

Social structure

• An agrarian society: the village as the unit, landholding castes and communities, artisans and service castes
• Scheduled Castes; Haryana has no notified Scheduled Tribes
• Religious communities: Hindus, Muslims (the Meos of Mewat), Sikhs, Jains
• Joint families, kinship and gotra rules in marriage
• Khap panchayats: traditional clan and territorial councils, their social role, and the Supreme Court’s guidelines against honour-related violence (Shakti Vahini v. Union of India, 2018)

Demography

• Census 2011: population, density, literacy, urban share by district
• Sex ratio (879) and child sex ratio (834) in Census 2011, among the lowest in India; their causes and the improvement since
• Migration: workers coming into the National Capital Region and the farms, people leaving for study and work abroad

Women

• Son preference, sex-selective abortion, dowry, ghoonghat, early marriage
• Beti Bachao Beti Padhao, launched at Panipat in 2015
• Women in panchayats, education and sport

Poverty and regional imbalance

• Differences between the prosperous north-east and the drier south-west
• Nuh (Mewat): backwardness in education, health and income, and its place among the Aspirational Districts
• Agrarian distress, indebtedness and small landholdings
• Unemployment among educated youth; drug abuse

Urbanisation

• The National Capital Region districts: Gurugram, Faridabad, Sonipat, Jhajjar, Panipat and others
• Planned sectors and unplanned colonies; waterlogging, traffic, waste and air pollution
• Changes in villages swallowed by cities: land sales, rentier incomes, new aspirations

Globalisation and Haryana

• Gurugram as a centre of IT, IT-enabled services and multinational firms; Manesar’s automobile cluster
• Effects on culture, family, consumption and the rural-urban divide

Social empowerment and social tensions

• Welfare for Scheduled Castes, backward classes, the elderly and persons with disabilities
• Reservation demands and agitations
• Caste-based discrimination and atrocities; communal harmony in Mewat and elsewhere
• Regional feeling: river waters, Chandigarh, the Hindi-Punjabi question

Education, health and local democracy

• Gaps in literacy between men and women and between districts
• Malnutrition and anaemia among women and children
• The Haryana Panchayati Raj (Amendment) Act, 2015, which set minimum educational qualifications for panchayat candidates, upheld by the Supreme Court in Rajbala v. State of Haryana (2015)
• Sports as a route to social mobility; the state’s share of national and Olympic medals
• Social reform traditions: the Arya Samaj, the Sant tradition, the mathas and deras of the region

Overlaps

• The national topics: Indian Society and Diversity, Women, Population, Poverty and Urbanisation, Globalisation.
• Haryana’s welfare schemes and social sector: HCS Mains: General Studies II.