Dr. Raees Mohammed comes from an Arundhatiyar family in Kotagiri, Nilgiris District, Tamil Nadu. After finishing his Doctoral Thesis on “Sanitation Workers in South India” from Indian Institute for Advance Studies in Shimla, he finished a post-doctorate from the University of West Cape, South Africa. Raees was active in anti-caste politics in his student days at Hyderabad Central University. He founded Dalit Camera – a YouTube channel in 2011 – which has reached 90,300 subscribers. Dalit Camera reports on and critically engages with issues around caste from the perspective of Dalit, Bahujan, Adivasi and other minorities living in India.

He also was one of the founders of the Nilgiris Sanitation Workers Union, the first registered trade union of sanitation and allied workers. Following the collapse of a 20 feet wall that was erected to keep Dalits out in Mettupalayam – which killed 17 people including 10 women and 3 children – Raees shed his previous identity as Ravichandran Bathran and converted to Islam adopting the name Raees Mohammed “in order to leave the caste system”. Raees works on the ground mobilizing sanitation workers and ekes his livelihood by running a small shop and operating a septic tank cleaning truck.

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