YouTube eye on a brutal caste system

''The upper castes have ordered us to show respect to them by taking off our shoes when we walk past their homes,'' the women told her. The next day, she took a camera with her, filmed the women removing their shoes and uploaded it on to a new YouTube channel called ‘Dalitcamera Ambedkar’.

The two-year-old channel is dedicated to showing what many Indians would rather not see: footage of the discrimination that still exists against Dalits, the lowest caste in Hinduism. The founder, Bathram Ravichandran, 32, chose YouTube because television channels almost totally ignore the country's 165 million Dalits. While the print media occasionally carries stories of Dalits being denied their rights, the visual media has made Dalits invisible.

Consequently, when Dalits are killed, denied entry into temples or access to wells, forced in schools to sit separately in a corner, served tea in tea shops in different cups that they have to wash themselves, denied jobs, beaten up for demanding their rights, or raped and paraded naked in front of a village, the crimes go unreported.

In 1992, when the issue of the media failing to recruit Dalits was first examined, there were no Dalits in newspapers or TV channels. A 2006 survey found not a single Dalit among 315 senior journalists. Today, studies show that Dalits are still almost totally absent from the media, a fact that helps explain the absence of Dalit stories.

The lack of coverage allows some affluent Indians to delude themselves that Dalits are no longer despised and no longer given the dirtiest and lowest-paid jobs. That is the illusion Ravichandran hopes to smash with his YouTube channel.

''As a student, I didn't have the means to start a newspaper or television channel. But what I could do was to film instances of discrimination. When we hear of an atrocity, we interview the victim, put up whatever raw footage we have, record Dalits' opinions and upload the video,'' says Ravichandran.

A doctoral student of English at the English and Foreign Languages University in Hyderabad, Ravichandran's channel has succeeded where other attempts to set up a newspaper to record Dalit lives and experiences have failed. The channel has become a rallying point for the community, with its videos generating intense debate on Dalit social media not just in India but abroad.

The idea of a YouTube channel came to Ravichandran after he was attacked by 20 upper-caste students on campus for being too ''bolshie'' as a student leader two years ago in Hyderabad. He was trying to decide how to deal with the humiliation when he heard that a Dalit woman head of a village panchayat (council), known only as Khrishnaveni, had been so brutally attacked by upper-caste villagers outside Hyderabad that she would be unable to walk for several months.

''I borrowed a handycam from a friend and went and interviewed her. We filmed people who described how the upper castes had stopped her functioning. She wasn't even allowed to sit in a chair during meetings,'' he says.

Since then, Ravichandran and about 20 other Dalit activists have kept filming and uploading videos. The coverage varies enormously and includes an interview with Booker Prize-winning novelist Arundhati Roy talking about caste discrimination. (Roy recently wrote that the caste system is ''one of the most brutal modes of hierarchical social organisation that human society has known.'')

Despite a government policy of affirmative action, Dalits continue to suffer a scorn that scars many of them psychologically for life. For example, in the shoe-removing video, a Dalit sweeper remarks, ''I have to live my caste identity every day. I cannot get away from it.''

Ravichandran himself comes from a caste whose members work as manual scavengers, people who remove human excrement from homes that do not have flush toilets. Thanks to affirmative action in education, Ravichandran was able to get to university.

Georgy Kuruvila Roy, a 24-year-old PhD student in Kolkata, is a volunteer who uploaded a video during the debate that followed the Delhi gang rape case in 2012.

''I interviewed a Dalit activist who pointed out that the rape of Dalit women is never covered by the media but when an upper caste, urban, educated woman is raped, it is a story,'' he says.

The statistics back him up. The same year that the young woman was gang raped in Delhi, official figures show that 1574 Dalit women were raped. This, though, was not deemed to be news.

The next stop, says Ravichandran, is for Dalitcamera Ambedkar to buy a professional camera. Next, raise enough money to start paying volunteers. And then, set up a news website for Dalit stories. ''If everyone starts filming what is happening to Dalits, just imagine the impact we can have,'' he says. ''The camera has become a tool for our self-respect.''