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Caste and Socoieconomic Disparities in India: An Overview

Handbook on Economics of Discrimination and Affirmative Action

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Abstract

The chapter provides an overview on the extent of caste disparities in contemporary India. The evidence shows that the social basis of reproduction of caste – endogamy and untouchability practices – remain prevalent and widespread. Caste-based affirmative action is seen to be instrumental in improving human capital outcomes and providing access to better jobs for the disadvantaged group though in spite of these the gaps in higher education and white collar occupation are seen to have widened in the post-independence era. The regional patterns suggest that the caste disadvantage are especially acute in the northern and central plains of India. The evidence shows that caste remains a key mediator of socioeconomic status in today’s India.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For instance, see Deshpande (2011) and Thorat and Neuman (2012) for detailed analysis of the role of caste in economic outcomes and Mosse (2018) and Munshi (2019) for recent reviews of the literature.

  2. 2.

    The evidence indicates that the bulk of the Rigveda Samhita was composed in the northwestern region of the Indian subcontinent between c. 1500 and 1000 BCE (Witzel 2019).

  3. 3.

    The 1872 and 1881 censuses already attempted to classify people by the Varna system though it was not uniformly applied and implemented throughout the country.

  4. 4.

    This implied that in the reserved constituencies only candidates from the “depressed classes” could be a candidate; however, the electorate would consist of both the “depressed classes” as well as the rest of the individuals living in the constituency, instead of just the former, as Ambedkar desired and had originally demanded.

  5. 5.

    On the other hand, understanding how groups organize life and decisions regarding marriage, risk sharing and insurance, access to credit and capital, as well as to business and economic networks may require us to understand the interactions at the Jati or sub-caste level. This is however not the focus of this review chapter.

  6. 6.

    Bidner and Eswaran (2015) provide a theoretical model that shows that specialization of labor combined with wife’s complementary contribution to the occupation of her husband results in giving rise to endogamy to counter externalities imposed by out-caste marriages. This in turn they argue gave rise to “the purity–pollution dichotomy, the rituals associated with it, and the notions of status that figure so prominently in discussions of caste,” thus they suggest that the rituals of untouchability were the means employed to establish the caste system, and not its cause.

  7. 7.

    This is based on a subjective classification following Hnatkovska et al. (2012). The category of agricultural jobs includes workers such as farmers, fishermen, loggers, hunters, etc.; blue collar jobs includes workers such as sales workers, service workers, and production workers; and white collar jobs includes people employed as administrators, executives, managers, professionals, and technical and clerical workers.

  8. 8.

    These are based on the NSS estimates from the rounds collected in 2004–2005 and 2011–2012.

  9. 9.

    It is important to note that the authors find that students from the reserved category are more likely to take up public sector jobs. Public sector jobs have lower incomes but often come up with a host of other benefits – subsidized housing, health care and pensions. Monetizing these benefits might suggest that the absolute cost is overestimated. Moreover, due to small sample sizes and their evidence being from engineering colleges in one state in India, their validity to other fields and parts of India should be extended with caution.

  10. 10.

    In fact, under some specifications, the authors find that higher proportions of SC-ST employees in high-level positions are positively associated with higher TFP.

  11. 11.

    Only districts where there are a minimum of 50 observations. On an average 177, 430 and 467 observations per district for the UC-Hindus, OBCs and SC-ST, respectively.

  12. 12.

    The present-day states of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, and Uttarakhand were part of Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, and Uttar Pradesh, respectively, at the time the BIMARU acronym was coined and we thus include them in the category of BIMARU.

  13. 13.

    The states included in the southern region are Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Telangana.

  14. 14.

    The states included in the northern region include Chandigarh, Delhi, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu & Kashmir, and Punjab.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, School of Business, Monash University Malaysia, Selangor, Malaysia

    Rajesh Ramachandran

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  1. Rajesh Ramachandran
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Correspondence to Rajesh Ramachandran .

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  1. Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, New Delhi, India

    Ashwini Deshpande

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Ramachandran, R. (2023). Caste and Socoieconomic Disparities in India: An Overview. In: Deshpande, A. (eds) Handbook on Economics of Discrimination and Affirmative Action. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-4016-9_23-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-4016-9_23-2

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  1. Latest

    Caste and Socoieconomic Disparities in India: An Overview
    Published:
    05 May 2023

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-4016-9_23-2

  2. Original

    Caste and Socoieconomic Disparities in India: An Overview
    Published:
    15 February 2023

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-4016-9_23-1

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