Breaking down the question
The instruction is to write some of the important social reforms directed at removing untouchability. It is largely expository, but at 10 marks the examiner still rewards organisation and a sense of the different streams of reform rather than a random list of names.
The key is to structure the material — reform can be sorted into upper-caste-led reform from within, self-assertion by the oppressed themselves, and reform through the state and law. Covering all three streams, rather than only the famous names, shows analytical control.
The note on backward classes and Dalit movements supplies the background.
How to approach it
Open with a one-line sense of untouchability as the extreme edge of caste hierarchy, so the reforms have a clear target. Then move through the streams in rough chronological order — nineteenth-century reformers and reformist bodies, the self-respect and anti-caste assertion of Phule and Ambedkar, Gandhi's Harijan campaign, and finally the constitutional and legal abolition after independence.
Keep each reform to a crisp sentence or two given the tight word limit, and close by noting that legal abolition has not fully ended the practice.
Model answer
Untouchability, the practice of treating certain castes as ritually polluting and excluding them from social, religious and economic life, was the most degrading feature of the caste order, and its removal became a central concern of Indian social reform. The important reforms fall into three broad streams.
Reform from within caste-Hindu society. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century reformers attacked untouchability as a corruption of true religion. The Brahmo Samaj and the Prarthana Samaj campaigned against caste rigidities, and the Arya Samaj under Dayananda Saraswati promoted shuddhi and the education of the depressed classes to reintegrate them. Sri Narayana Guru in Kerala preached “one caste, one religion, one God for man” and built temples open to all, striking directly at exclusion.
Self-assertion by the oppressed. The most transformative reform came from the lower castes themselves. Jyotirao Phule founded the Satyashodhak Samaj and opened schools for untouchables and girls, framing caste as a system of Brahminical domination. In the twentieth century B. R. Ambedkar led the decisive challenge — the Mahad Satyagraha for the right to draw water from a public tank, the Kalaram temple-entry movement, the burning of the Manusmriti, and finally the call for the annihilation of caste and mass conversion to Buddhism as an escape from Hindu hierarchy. E. V. Ramasamy “Periyar” led the Self-Respect Movement in the south against caste and untouchability.
The Gandhian campaign. M. K. Gandhi made the abolition of untouchability a plank of the national movement, renaming untouchables Harijans, founding the Harijan Sevak Sangh, undertaking fasts, and leading temple-entry campaigns. His approach, seeking to reform caste from within rather than abolish it, was criticised by Ambedkar as paternalistic, but it placed the issue at the centre of public life.
Constitutional and legal reform. After independence reform became a matter of law. Article 17 of the Constitution abolished untouchability and forbade its practice in any form, and the Untouchability (Offences) Act of 1955, later strengthened as the Protection of Civil Rights Act, made its practice punishable. Reservation in legislatures, education and public employment gave the former untouchables a route to representation and mobility, and the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act added further protection.
Together these reforms — religious, social, political and legal — dismantled the formal legitimacy of untouchability. Yet its social persistence in discrimination and atrocity shows that legal abolition, though decisive, has not by itself completed the task the reformers set themselves.
Examiner's perspective
At 10 marks the examiner rewards organisation over sheer length. A script that simply lists names scores less than one that sorts the reforms into streams — reform from within, self-assertion by the oppressed, the Gandhian campaign, and constitutional abolition — and attaches the right figures to each.
The strongest answers give Ambedkar and Phule their due as leaders of self-emancipation rather than reducing the story to Gandhi, cite Article 17 and the relevant statutes accurately, and close by noting the gap between legal abolition and social reality. Precise attribution and British spelling within the word limit secure the higher band.