Dalit Hari Kishan Pippal, 60, a member of India’s outcast community once known as untouchables, inspects a pair of shoes at his shoe factory in Agra, India, on Nov. 22, 2011. Raised in poverty, he only made it through high school before his father became ill, and he had to go to work pulling a rickshaw to support the family. The vast majority of India’s 170 million dalits live amid a thicket of grim statistics: less than a third are literate, well over 40 percent survive on less than $2 a day, infant mortality rates are higher than among higher castes. Dalits have long dominated the shoe business since caste is largely a reflection of traditional trades and making shoes involved working with the skins of dead animals. Pippal owns a hospital, a shoe factory, a car dealership and a publishing company.