When a volunteer worker in Rajasthan recently saw dalit (formerly untouchable) women labourers in a village removing their shoes for a stretch of road on their way to work at a construction site and then putting them on again for the rest of the way, she was mystified. ''Why are you taking off your shoes?'' she asked.

''The upper castes have ordered us to show respect to them by taking off our shoes when we walk past their homes,'' the women told her. The next day, she took a camera with her, filmed the women removing their shoes and uploaded it on to a new YouTube channel called Dalitcamera Ambedkar.

Dalitcamera volunteer filming dalit students in Hyperbad promoting the eating of beef, which is abhorred by high caste Hindus but practised by dalits.

The two-year-old channel is dedicated to showing what many Indians would rather not see: footage of the discrimination that still exists against dalits, the lowest caste in Hinduism. The founder, Bathram Ravichandran, 32, chose YouTube because television channels almost totally ignore the country's 165 million dalits. While the print media occasionally carries stories of dalits being denied their rights, the visual media has made dalits invisible.

Consequently, when dalits are killed, denied entry into temples or access to wells, forced in schools to sit separately in a corner, served tea in tea shops in different cups that they have to wash themselves, denied jobs, beaten up for demanding their rights, or raped and paraded naked in front of a village, the crimes go unreported.