I just looked at the first 5 candidates sitting in my recruiterbox account (hiring for a position in Delhi). Not a single one listed parents, marital status, birth location, age, height or weight.

You are correct that outside IT, hiring decisions rely heavily on the community. Within most serious IT firms, which definitively include Infosys and Tata, hiring is roughly as meritocratic as it is in the west. That's due to simple market forces - your community is simply not big enough or smart enough that you can hire exclusively from within it.

("Community" refers to a narrow slice of your ethnic group, e.g. Parsis, Gujus or Conkanis.)