[24] In 1907, he passed his matriculation examination and in the following year he entered Elphinstone College, which was affiliated to the University of Bombay, becoming, according to him, the first from his Mahar caste to do so.

A public ceremony was evoked, to celebrate his success, by the community, and it was at this occasion that he was presented with a biography of the Buddha by Dada Keluskar, the author and a family friend.

[25] By 1912, he obtained his degree in economics and political science from Bombay University, and prepared to take up employment with the Baroda state government.

His first organised attempt was his establishment of the central institution Bahishkrit Hitakarini Sabha, intended to promote education and socio-economic improvement, as well as the welfare of "outcastes", at the time referred to as depressed classes.

The procession was headed by a military band and a batch of scouts; women and men walked with discipline, order and determination to see the god for the first time.

Following the fast, congressional politicians and activists such as Madan Mohan Malaviya and Palwankar Baloo organised joint meetings with Ambedkar and his supporters at Yerwada.

Due to the pact the depressed class received 148 seats in the legislature instead of the 71, as allocated in the Communal Award proposed earlier by the colonial government under Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald.

[50] In the Poona Pact, a unified electorate was in principle formed, but primary and secondary elections allowed Untouchables in practice to choose their own candidates.

He also served as the chairman of Governing body of Ramjas College, University of Delhi, after the death of its Founder Shri Rai Kedarnath.

At the Yeola Conversion Conference on 13 October in Nasik, Ambedkar announced his intention to convert to a different religion and exhorted his followers to leave Hinduism.

[60] During this time, Ambedkar also fought against the khoti system prevalent in Konkan, where khots, or government revenue collectors, regularly exploited farmers and tenants.

In 1937, Ambedkar tabled a bill in the Bombay Legislative Assembly aimed at abolishing the khoti system by creating a direct relationship between government and farmers.

[63] Jinnah and Ambedkar jointly addressed the heavily attended Day of Deliverance event in Bhindi Bazaar, Bombay, where both expressed "fiery" criticisms of the Congress party, and according to one observer, suggested that Islam and Hinduism were irreconcilable.

[71] Ambedkar contested in the Bombay North first Indian General Election of 1952, but lost to his former assistant and Congress Party candidate Narayan Sadoba Kajrolkar.

While the prescriptions by the Prophet regarding the just and humane treatment of slaves contained in the Koran are praiseworthy, there is nothing whatever in Islam that lends support to the abolition of this curse.

"[74] Indian constitution guarantees and protections for a wide range of civil liberties for individual citizens, including freedom of religion, the abolition of untouchability, and the outlawing of all forms of discrimination.

He believed that the lack of a strong democratic tradition, the widespread presence of ‘bhakti’ or political ‘hero worship’ and the large gap between the republican promises of the Constitution and socio-economic inequality, made this a distinct and ever-present possibility.

[citation needed] Ambedkar advocated national economic and social development, stressing education, public hygiene, community health, residential facilities as the basic amenities.

Ambedkar's theory of free banking was built on Menger's work and also on Gopal Krishna Gokhale's treatise on finance and money.

After completing the draft of India's constitution in the late 1940s, he suffered from lack of sleep, had neuropathic pain in his legs, and was taking insulin and homoeopathic medicines.

[94] Instead, around 1950, he began devoting his attention to Buddhism and travelled to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to attend a meeting of the World Fellowship of Buddhists.

[98] After meetings with the Sri Lankan Buddhist monk Hammalawa Saddhatissa,[99] Ambedkar organised a formal public ceremony for himself and his supporters in Nagpur on 14 October 1956.

[113] On the anniversary of his birth and death, and on Dhamma Chakra Pravartan Din (14 October) at Nagpur, at least half a million people gather to pay homage to him at his memorial in Mumbai.

[121] Ambedkar was voted "the Greatest Indian" since independence by a poll organised by History TV18 and CNN IBN, ahead of Patel and Nehru, in 2012.

[148] In Annihilation of Caste, Ambedkar claims that the only lasting way a true casteless society could be achieved is through destroying the belief of the sanctity of the Shastras and denying their authority.

[155] Initially, Ambedkar planned to convert to Sikhism but he rejected this idea after he discovered that British government would not guarantee the privileges accorded to the untouchables in reserved parliamentary seats.

[158] Ambedkar viewed Shudras as originally having been "part of the Kshatriya Varna in the Indo-Aryan society", but became socially degraded after they inflicted many tyrannies on Brahmins.

He also saw Communists as willing to resort to any means to achieve proletarian revolution, including violence, while he himself saw democratic and peaceful measures as the best option for change.

Ambedkar also opposed the Marxist idea of controlling all the means of production and ending private ownership of property: seeing the latter measure as not able to fix the problems of society.

[84] But in the 1950s, in an interview he gave to BBC, he accepted that the current liberal democratic system will collapse and the alternative, as he thinks, "is some kind of communism".