How do you end India's caste system from Toronto? Only through international pressure and hard work, according to York Economics professor Sam Lanfranco, an advisor with the Toronto-based Ambedkar Centre for Justice and Peace. The centre was founded in 1991 by Toronto businessman Yogesh Varhade to end a system that determines people's status in life based on the livelihood of their family.

    "The filthiest and most unhygienic jobs -- caring for the dead, cleaning the latrines and carrying away human waste -- are relegated to the untouchables," Varhade says.

    There are about 250 million untouchables in India, Lanfranco says. Daily injustices include personal humiliations, like the university student who won a gold medal in mathematics but couldn't graduate because a Hindu university refused to give the medal to an untouchable, or the 1995 case of a kindergarten girl who touched a drinking cup designated for high-caste children and was blinded as punishment.

    "There is not much untouchables can do because the court system won't look at it," Lanfranco explains.

    The centre is named after the late Bhimrao Ambedkar, an untouchable who earned two PhDs and a law degree from western universities. He was the chief architect of India's constitution and independent India's first Minister of Law.

    The centre's strategy involves showing those people in India who receive aid money what is going on in terms of caste discrimination. The centre also works with grassroots groups in India to help them document atrocities.

    Varhade's work, Lanfranco says, "culminated [in 1995] in the UN Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in Geneva," which issued a formal report requiring India to report back by January 1998, on what it's doing to improve the civil rights of untouchables.

    Varhade also met with the Canadian Parliamentary Subcommittee on Sustainable Development on Child Labour in 1996.

    "The G-7 countries control the purse for financing India's industrialization and its foreign debt," Varhade says. "If India is made an outcast in international civil society by sanctions, India will immediately react in a strong, positive way."