His father Sobhi Ram was with the British Indian Army, posted at Peshawar, but later resigned due to some differences, and bought farming land in his native village Chandwa and settled there.

In 2007, the BHU set up a Babu Jagjivan Ram Chair in its faculty of social sciences to study caste discrimination and economic backwardness.

degree from the University of Calcutta in 1931, where again he organised conferences to draw attention toward issues of discrimination, and also participated in the anti-untouchability movement started by Mahatma Gandhi.

[14] Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose took notice of him at Kolkata, when in 1928 he organised a Mazdoor Rally at Wellington Square, in which approximately 50,000 people participated.

[17] When popular rule was introduced under the 1935 Act and the scheduled castes were given representation in the legislatures, both the nationalists and the British loyalists sought him because of his first-hand knowledge of the social and economic situation in Bihar.

He chose to go with the nationalists and joined Congress, which wanted him not only because he was valued as an able spokesperson for the depressed classes, but also that he could counter B. R. Ambedkar; he was elected to the Bihar assembly in 1937.

In the same year he voted in favor of a resolution presented in the 1935 session of the Hindu Mahasabha demanding that temples and drinking water wells be opened up to Dalits;[20] and in the early 1940s was imprisoned twice for his active participation in the Satyagraha and the Quit India Movements.

He was among the principal leaders who publicly denounced India's participation in the World War II between the European nations and for which he was imprisoned in 1940.

[21] In the Constituent Assembly[22] he advocated for the rights of Dalits and argued for affirmative action based on caste in elected bodies and government services.

[23] He was a part of the prestigious high-profile Indian delegation that attended the International Labour Organization (ILO)'s International Labour Conference on 16 August 1947 in Geneva, along with the great Gandhian Bihar Bibhuti Dr. Anugrah Narayan Sinha,[24] his chief political mentor and also the then head of the delegation, and a few days later he was elected President of the ILO.

While loyal to prime minister Indira Gandhi for most of the Indian Emergency, in 1977 he along with five other politicians resigned from the Cabinet and formed the Congress for Democracy party, within the Janata coalition.

The national broadcaster Doordarshan allegedly attempted to stop crowds from participating in the demonstration by telecasting the blockbuster movie Bobby.

Though initially reluctant to join the cabinet, he was not present at the oath-taking ceremony on 24 March 1977, but he eventually did so at the behest of Jai Prakash Narayan, who insisted that his presence was necessary, "not just as an individual but as a political and social force.

After death of his first wife in August 1933 after a brief illness, Jagjivan Ram married Indrani Devi, a daughter of Dr. Birbal, a well-known social worker of Kanpur.

The place of his cremation has been turned into a memorial, Samta Sthal, and his birth anniversary is observed as Samata Diwas (Equality Day) in India.

[47] In 2015, the Babu Jagjeevan Ram English Medium Secondary School was established in Mahatma Gandhi Nagar, Yerawada, Pune.