Who sits close to power
and who sits at the rim
An interactive version of the Indian Wheel of Power & Powerlessness. Twelve axes, three bands on each, thirty-six positions a person can occupy. Open any band to see the Indian evidence behind where it sits: the survey, the statute or the judgment, with the source and year given.
Every axis also says what the evidence leaves unsettled.
The wheel is not ours. It was built in 2022–23 by The Listeners Collective, Bengaluru, adapting Sylvia Duckworth’s Wheel of Power/Privilege. ImpactMojo added the evidence behind each position. Full credits ↓
The centre is power. Everything else is distance from it.
Each wedge is one axis along which Indian society sorts people, and each ring is a position on it. Groups nearer the hub tend to hold more of the power in a room: in law, in assets, and in who gets counted at all.
What this wheel is not
There is no score. Nothing here totals up, and no ranking of who has it worst comes out of it. Adding the bands together would turn a map of structures into a contest between people.
The axes do not simply add. A Dalit woman’s position is not “woman, plus caste”. That was Kimberlé Crenshaw’s point in naming intersectionality, and Gopal Guru’s in writing that Dalit women talk differently. Concentric rings cannot show two axes acting on each other.
Placement moves. It changes by state, by decade and by room. A Christian in Mizoram, a Muslim in Lakshadweep and a Hindi speaker in Chennai all sit somewhere the national average will not predict.
Thirty-six bands, each with its evidence
Tap a band on the wheel, or use the Axis and Band buttons underneath. They do the same thing, and the buttons are easier to hit on a phone. On a keyboard: tab in, arrow keys to move, Enter to open. Every selection has its own shareable link.
Marking is a private exercise. It stays in your browser, is sent nowhere, and produces no score.
The twelve axes, written out
The same 113 pieces of evidence as plain text, readable without the wheel, on a screen reader or on paper. Every entry names its source and year.
How a band earns its place
A placement on this page had to be backed by at least one of three things: a national statistical source (Census, NFHS, PLFS, NSS, NCRB, AISHE, UDISE+, the Time Use Survey), a statute or constitutional provision, or a reported judgment. Where a figure could not be sourced to a named publication and year, it is not on the page.
That rule left gaps. They are still gaps here rather than being filled with plausible-sounding numbers:
- Body and appearance has the least behind it. No Indian official survey collects skin tone, body size or appearance-based discrimination, so the placement rests on market and case-law evidence. The panel says as much.
- Sexual orientation has no population data at all. The Census, NFHS and PLFS do not ask, so every figure in that wedge describes law rather than people.
- Disability is measured at 2.2% of the population against a global estimate nearer 16%. The outer band is largely a population the state has not counted, and being uncounted is part of the disadvantage.
- Caste beyond SC and ST has not been enumerated nationally since 1931, so the OBC band rests on state surveys and sample data rather than a census.
Two figures are drawn from the NITI Aayog National MPI baseline round (NFHS-4, 2015–16) rather than the 2023 Progress Review, because the baseline is where the social-group breakdown is published. They are labelled that way in the panels.
If a figure here is stale, misattributed or misread, please tell us or open an issue on GitHub.
Whose wheel this is
The design of the wheel, the choice of twelve axes and the placement of groups within them are not ImpactMojo’s work. This page adds the evidence behind those positions and nothing else.
The Indian Wheel of Power & Powerlessness
The Listeners Collective in Bengaluru, a multidisciplinary group of mental health practitioners working from a social-justice frame. They saw the need for a wheel centred on Indian social reality and built it with mental health professionals, subject-matter experts and people with lived experience.
Developed 2022, published 2023 · Disha Paul, Ayush Biswas, Trupti M. and Ganga Nair, with contributors
The wheel it adapts
Sylvia Duckworth’s Wheel of Power/Privilege, an illustration made for the Canadian Council for Refugees, which has since been adapted into many languages and national contexts. The Indian wheel is one of those adaptations.
Illustration by Sylvia Duckworth · original for the Canadian Council for Refugees
The idea underneath it
Kimberlé Crenshaw named intersectionality in 1989, and Patricia Hill Collins gave it the “matrix of domination”. Every wheel of this kind is a diagram of that argument.
Crenshaw 1989 · Collins 1990
The Indian lineage
The argument that Indian power has to be read through caste and gender together is much older than the diagram: B.R. Ambedkar (Annihilation of Caste, 1936), Savitribai and Jotirao Phule, Uma Chakravarti on brahmanical patriarchy, Sharmila Rege on Dalit feminist standpoint, and Gopal Guru’s “Dalit Women Talk Differently” (1995).
What ImpactMojo added
The interactive map, and the evidence: 113 sourced statistics, statutes and judgments attached to the 36 bands, each with a named publication and year, plus a note on each axis about what the evidence does not settle.
ImpactMojo, 2026 · content CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 · code MIT
Sources drawn on
NFHS-5 (2019–21) · PLFS (2023–24) · Census of India (2011) · NSS 76th Round (2018) · NCRB Crime in India (2022) · AISHE (2021–22) · ASER (2024) · Time Use Survey (2019) · NITI Aayog National MPI · World Inequality Lab (2024) · UNFPA & IIPS India Ageing Report (2023) · Access Now (2023) · UNESCO · Sachar Committee (2006) · India Human Development Survey-II.
Using this in a classroom or workshop
The wheel works better as a conversation opener than as a handout. One sequence that works: let people mark themselves privately, pick one axis where their own placement surprised them, then read the evidence panel together and argue with it.
If you reproduce the wheel, credit The Listeners Collective, and Sylvia Duckworth for the original. If you reproduce the evidence, credit ImpactMojo and check the figures against their sources first. Several will be out of date within a year.