Most of them come from villages, are elderly, and belong to the higher castes.
BBC: Does the Kumbh Mela experience improve your well being?
In 1990, a Janata Dal-led coalition increased quotas for these castes in government jobs and colleges.
The Janata Dal is also banking on the votes of India's numerous backward castes.
The 200-million-strong community was traditionally engaged in menial jobs which the other higher castes consider "unclean".
This is India's characteristic way of building majorities from its patchwork of castes, language groups and states.
Most societies are based on an informal alliance between two of these three castes, writes Mr Priestland.
In any case, compared with hereditary castes elsewhere in the world, most British titles are not very old.
The Sri Nathji temple in the northwestern state of Rajasthan is normally out of bounds to members of lower castes.
Fitting perhaps that the district takes its name from a nearby shrine to a man born of India's untouchable castes.
Studies have also shown that the wage gap between Dalits and other castes have narrowed and their standing has improved.
Unlike the north, where knowledge has traditionally been the privilege of the upper castes, Kerala experienced an even spread of education.
The research found that an overwhelming 93% belonged to the forward castes.
Before the partition, traditional culture frowned on eating out, and members of certain religious groups and castes weren't allowed to be professional cooks.
After the lower castes collect as much grain as they can carry away, the benefactors will "purify" the temple by washing it with milk.
In another area only 23% of dalits reported sitting with guests of other castes at weddings in 1990, but, by 2007, 91% did so.
When it comes to fighting for power in Bihar, the Yadavs (the name also applies to a caste) are enemies of the upper castes.
More than three-fourths of the women at the Juna Sannyasini Akhara hail from Nepal, where widows from the upper castes are encouraged not to remarry.
He has got away with it, thanks largely to his rustic pugnacity, which he uses to needle the upper castes and charm the lower ones.
The expansion of mother tongue-based literacy programmes is an immediate response to the large mass of non-literate and disadvantaged castes and ethnic groups of women learners in Nepal.
Secondary-school attendance among the Scheduled Castes generally remains shockingly low.
The implausible alliance between landed and landless castes (in some parts of Bihar, Ranbir Sena and its victims) is likely to make more sense to politicians than to the people.
Experts say the move was a response to social discrimination against low castes in Punjab, where close to 30 percent of the population is Dalit, the highest in any Indian state.
The Kumbh Mela brings together Hindus of all castes and creeds, but its most famous attendees are the sadhus (wandering Hindu holy men who have renounced caste, money, possessions and social position).
"They appear to have asserted themselves in a strategy that will give them a greater bargaining strength in their home state where power has centered around specific castes, " said columnist Jaspal Singh Sidhu.
The researchers say there could be a host of reasons - caste discrimination itself (members of other castes refuse to work with the lowest castes), lack of knowledge, illiteracy, and problems with securing finance.
Southerners also have a more highly developed sense of individualism because the social structure in the south is not graded into an infinite number of vocation-specific intermediate castes, as is the case in the north.
The lower castes also lose out on generous benefits, such as transport allowances, company pensions, subsidised insurance and paid holiday (though regular workers have long been pressured not to use it, to show dedication to the company).
Mining information thrown up by the 2005 economic census covering more than 42 million enterprises, they found schedule castes owned only 9.8% of all enterprises in India in 2005, well below their 16.4% share of the total population.
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