The documentary at the heart of the study reconstructs the life and death of Dr. Balmukund Bharti, a student from a historically marginalized community who died by suicide within India’s competitive medical education system. The filmmakers document the accusations, stigma and social isolation that surrounded students admitted through constitutionally mandated reservation policies. In the dominant meritocratic discourse of Indian higher education, such students are frequently labeled quota students or beneficiaries of the reservation system, terms the study identifies as stigmatizing devices that frame Dalit students as intellectually incompetent and undeserving of their seats, regardless of their actual performance.

To build its theoretical framework, the study draws on three intellectual pillars. Ajantha Subramanian’s ethnographic work on the Indian Institutes of Technology, culminating in her book The Caste of Merit, demonstrates how upper-caste students convert generations of accumulated social advantage into apparently earned academic excellence. Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of cultural capital and reproduction explain how educational systems quietly reward the dispositions, languages and confidence transmitted within privileged families while penalizing those who arrive without them. Stuart Hall’s encoding and decoding model allows the authors to read the documentary itself as a mediated text whose meanings are actively produced and contested rather than passively recorded.

Through this combined lens, merit emerges as what the authors call an institutional construct structured by caste. Upper-caste students typically inherit English fluency, familiarity with elite academic cultures, coaching networks, professional role models and the unmarked comfort of belonging to the dominant social group. None of these advantages appear on an entrance examination scorecard, yet all of them shape who succeeds once inside the institution. When upper-caste privilege is converted into merit, the hierarchy that produced the advantage becomes invisible, and the Dalit student who struggles against unfamiliar codes is recast as the one who lacks ability.

The study pays close attention to the mundane mechanics of exclusion. Dalit students describe being segregated in hostels, avoided in laboratories and classrooms, subjected to open speculation about their admission scores, and denied the informal mentorship that carries privileged students through demanding professional programs. Drawing on Erving Goffman’s account of stigma and Harold Garfinkel’s analysis of degradation ceremonies, the authors show how repeated small humiliations function as public rituals that mark Dalit students as spoiled identities within the institutional community. The cumulative effect, they argue, is not incidental but structural: the dominant institutional culture is calibrated to upper-caste dispositions, rendering marginalized students as undeserving infiltrators in spaces that claim to be democratic.

The psychological toll of this environment is a central thread of the analysis. The authors cite research on the mental health impact of caste and structural inequality in Indian higher education, including work by Komanapalli and Rao on the psychiatric consequences of discrimination and studies linking caste-based exclusion to depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation. Stereotype threat, the well-documented phenomenon in which awareness of a negative group label degrades performance under pressure, compounds the burden. A student who must simultaneously master a rigorous curriculum and manage a daily assault on their belonging operates under conditions their privileged peers never encounter, yet only their outcomes are measured and judged.

The paper situates Bharti’s death within a broader and troubling pattern. The authors reference the 2007 report of the committee chaired by S.K. Thorat that investigated allegations of differential treatment of Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe students at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi, which documented hostility, social boycott and discriminatory practices. Subsequent scholarship, including ethnographies of Dalit students at elite Indian universities and analyses of multi-layered exclusion in premier institutions, has repeatedly found that reservation policies open doors that the internal culture of institutions then works to close. The study also invokes the concept of epistemic oppression developed by Kristie Dotson, describing how the knowledge and testimony of marginalized students are systematically discounted, making it difficult even to name the discrimination they experience.

Documentary film, the authors argue, plays a distinctive evidentiary role in this landscape. Citing scholarship on documentary as resistance, they treat The Death of Merit not merely as reportage but as a counter-archive that renders visible what institutional discourse renders invisible. Where university narratives celebrate meritocratic selection and official statistics obscure lived experience, the film preserves testimony, names stigma and locates individual deaths within structural causation. Hall’s encoding and decoding framework helps explain why such texts matter: audiences may read them in dominant, negotiated or oppositional ways, but the documentary intervenes in the public meaning of merit by insisting that caste is an active ingredient in academic outcomes rather than a residue of the past.

The timing of the study gives its argument contemporary urgency. The authors note recent controversy around the University Grants Commission’s 2026 Promotion of Equity in Higher Educational Institutions Regulations, which were stayed by the Supreme Court amid fierce public debate, alongside student protests and campus restrictions reported in the Indian press. These developments, the paper suggests, reveal how contested the politics of caste and equity in education remains, and how resistance to affirmative action frequently redeploys the language of merit to defend inherited advantage. The study’s bibliography traces a sustained scholarly conversation, from Satish Deshpande’s analysis of exclusive inequalities to recent work on the reproduction of caste privilege in elite institutions, indicating that the questions raised by Bharti’s death have only intensified over the past decade and a half.

The authors conclude with a call to re-imagine merit itself as a condition of social justice within India’s contemporary educational landscape. If merit is produced rather than merely revealed, they argue, then institutions bear responsibility for the environments in which students succeed or fail. That means interrogating how cultural capital is distributed before admission, how institutional cultures reward particular social dispositions after it, and how stigma transforms difference into deficit. The Death of Merit, read through this study, becomes more than a record of one student’s suffering; it is an analytical instrument that exposes the machinery by which caste survives inside institutions that claim to have transcended it. Until the conversion of privilege into merit is interrupted, the paper warns, India’s universities will continue to manufacture the exclusions they profess to have abolished, and the deaths of students like Balmukund Bharti will remain legible not as individual failures but as the signature of the system itself.

Subject of Research: Caste, merit and Dalit student suicide in Indian higher education analyzed through a documentary study

Article Title: Merit in the city: examining caste, suicide, and Indian higher education in Insight Foundation’s documentary text The Death of Merit: Dr. Balmukund Bharti (2011)

Article References: Kumain, S., Ganguly, D., & Anand, T. (2026). Merit in the city: examining caste, suicide, and Indian higher education in Insight Foundation’s documentary text The Death of Merit: Dr. Balmukund Bharti (2011). SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 510. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01812-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01812-y

Keywords: caste, merit, Dalit students, Indian higher education, suicide, documentary film, cultural capital, reservation policy, social exclusion, stigma, Bourdieu, Ajantha Subramanian

The study, published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, used an elegant experimental design to probe moral intuitions about distributive justice. Participants were asked to decide how bonuses should be allocated to real workers on an online labor market platform, choosing between allocation based on measured performance and allocation through a random lottery. This approach allowed the researchers to observe whether people reward merit or tolerate chance when real money is at stake for actual workers, rather than merely recording abstract opinions. The same participants were then asked about their support for redistribution through policy measures, including higher taxes on the wealthy, giving the team a direct window into the connection between private fairness judgments and public economic preferences.

The headline result is that, on average, the global population is substantially more willing to accept an unequal distribution of wealth when it is based on work rather than on pure chance. Earnings that flow from effort, skill and achievement are widely regarded as deserved, while windfalls produced by the roll of a dice are viewed with far more suspicion and are far more likely to trigger support for redistribution. In other words, inequality is not a single moral category. Two societies with identical levels of income dispersion may judge that dispersion in profoundly different ways depending on whether the rich earned their position or simply got lucky.

Yet this merit-based view of fairness is not universal, and here the study delivers its most provocative findings. The belief that prosperity achieved without personal effort is undeserved is strongest in countries with democratic political systems that are richer, more equal and more individualistic. Switzerland emerges as a paradigmatic case: the Swiss population places exceptional value on achievement through personal effort and is comparatively tolerant of income gaps produced by hard work and performance. At the same time, the Swiss remain open to a degree of redistribution, particularly in cases where inequality is clearly grounded in luck rather than merit. The moral logic seems to be that society should cushion the unlucky but need not penalize the successful.

In sharp contrast, the researchers documented a high level of acceptance of luck in several non-Western countries, with China and India standing out as prominent examples. In these societies, majorities were not only more accepting of prosperity gained by chance; they were also opposed to redistributing wealth that had been acquired through luck. This finding upends the assumption, common in Western economics and political philosophy, that chance-based inequality is morally illegitimate everywhere and that luck should be neutralized through taxation and transfer programs. Almås suggests that cultural and other factors underpin these divergent attitudes, and she indicates that future work will examine to what extent differences in redistributive preferences are associated with different religious beliefs, which may shape whether fortune is seen as a private blessing or a collective concern.

The study also tested an alternative explanation for why people might tolerate inequality even when they find it unfair. Redistribution, after all, is not costless. High earners may be believed to work less when redistributive taxes are in place, shrinking the economic pie and reducing incentives. If such efficiency concerns drive tolerance of inequality, then attitudes should correlate with beliefs about the economic costs of taxation rather than with moral judgments about the source of income. The analysis, however, found that this factor plays a much smaller role in the global acceptance of inequality than the origin of that inequality itself. Luck versus merit, it turns out, is the decisive axis along which people around the world evaluate whether a distribution deserves their approval.

These results carry important methodological lessons for the social sciences. Much of what economists and psychologists claim about human fairness norms has been built on studies of so-called WEIRD populations, that is, Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic societies. The findings reveal a significant contrast between Western and non-Western societies, demonstrating that conclusions drawn from Western samples cannot simply be generalized to humanity at large. A person in Zurich and a person in Delhi may look at the same distribution of income and reach opposite moral verdicts, not because one is mistaken about the facts, but because they are drawing on fundamentally different frameworks for justifying economic outcomes.

The practical implications extend well beyond the academy. Debates over progressive taxation, welfare programs and executive compensation are often framed as battles between egalitarians and defenders of the free market, with the underlying assumption that people respond to inequality itself. This research suggests that framing is incomplete. Public support for redistribution is likely to depend on the narrative attached to inequality, whether citizens believe the wealthy earned their position through effort or stumbled into it through inheritance, connections or chance. Policymakers who ignore the moral source of economic disparities may misread public opinion, and campaigns for or against redistribution may succeed or fail based on which account of merit dominates the public conversation.

For Almås and her colleagues, the dataset represents a foundation for a new generation of research on the moral justification of inequality. By covering eighty percent of the world’s population with a consistent experimental protocol, the study offers an unprecedented map of how fairness norms vary across cultures, political systems and levels of economic development. Understanding how societies morally justify inequality, and how those justifications in turn shape attitudes toward redistribution, is essential for anyone seeking to explain why some democracies embrace high taxes and generous welfare states while others resist them. The study does not settle whether luck or merit should matter, but it makes unmistakably clear that, in the court of global public opinion, not all inequality is judged equally, and the verdict differs dramatically depending on where you ask the question.

Subject of Research: Cross-national study of fairness preferences and attitudes toward income inequality and redistribution

Article Title: Luck or merit? Not all inequality is equally acceptable.

Article References: Luck or merit? Not all inequality is equally acceptable.. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: inequality, fairness, redistribution, merit, luck, economic preferences, University of Zurich, cross-cultural study, taxation, behavioral economics, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Ingvild Almås