Touch thee not: Group conflict,caste power and untouchability in rural India

We investigate the impact of community power on the practice of untouchability - the avoidance of physical contact – by upper and backward caste Hindus vis-à-vis ‘scheduled’ castes (SCs) in rural India. We hypothesize that an upper or Other Backward caste (OBC) household's propensity to practise untouchability is determined not solely by its own characteristics but, crucially, also by the inter-group distribution of resources across both caste and religious divides, via political contestation over behavioural norms. Our model predicts that greater collective resource endowment (power) of SCs, or that of Muslims and Christians, will reduce the likelihood of an upper caste or OBC household practising untouchability. A marginal redistribution of power from OBCs to upper castes may reduce it as well. Greater power of the combined upper caste and OBC bloc will increase it. Identifying a community's power with its population weighted land share, we find associations consistent with these predictions in data from the India Human Development Survey 2011–12.     

Caste at Birth? Redefining Disparity in India

Using household information in the National Family and Health Survey (NFHS) 1992/93 data, this paper examines regional variations in intercaste disparity in India. Based on five variables that are indicators of the standard of living of the three major caste/tribe groups identifiable in the data, a "caste deprivation index" is constructed that can be reversed to read as a "caste development index." Mapping the regional variation in this index, the paper makes a plea for focusing on caste as an essential ingredient in the study of stratification patterns in India's population.     

Assets versus Autonomy? The Changing Face of the Gender-Caste Overlap in India

Inter-group disparity in India is multifaceted; this paper focuses on gender and caste as two important indicators of disadvantage. An assessment of the contemporary state of the gender-caste overlap suggests that the economic condition of women continues to be defined and constrained by their caste status. At the same time, the traditional distinction between lower caste and upper caste women, based on the relative egalitarianism and greater freedom of movement of the latter, needs to be revised. The Dalit (low caste) women are the worst off, as they belong to a group that is materially at the bottom of the ladder; their relative deprivation is compounded by low levels of autonomy and greater exposure to domestic violence.     

Opportunity is not everything

We experimentally investigate in village India how belief systems that hierarchize social groups affect the groups’ responses to economic opportunities. Earlier we found that making caste salient hurt low caste performance both absolutely and relative to the high caste's. To examine the possible role of mistrust, we manipulate the scope for discretion in rewarding performance. When offered a gamble in which success mechanically triggers rewards, making caste salient has no significant effect. Instead, it is in the case with scope for discretion that making caste salient creates a large caste gap in the proportion of subjects who refuse the gamble.     

Caste discrimination in the Indian urban labour market

This, the pioneering quantitative analysis of caste in the Indian urban labour market, examines the age-old problem of caste in the light of discrimination theory and government policy. Using a survey of workers in Delhi, the gross wage difference between ‘scheduled’ (untouchable) and ‘non-scheduled’ caste is decomposed into its ‘explained’ and ‘discrimination’ components and, from a model of occupation choice, into wage- and job-discrimination. Discrimination is found to exist, and to operate at least in part through the traditional mechanism, viz. assignment to jobs, with the scheduled castes entering poorly-paid ‘dead-end’ jobs. It is assisted by methods of recruitment based on contacts, prevalent in the manual occupation, which also cause past discrimination to carry over to the present. Its practice serves the economic interests of those who exercise a taste for discrimination.     

Class or caste? A study on the role of caste and wealth status in school choice decision

There is a strong political opinion in India in favour of replacing caste based affirmative action with an economic class based one. We contribute to this debate by looking at the interaction of caste and wealth in school choice. We show that too rich and too poor parents behave in the same way irrespective of their caste identities—rich parents sending their children to private schools while poor parents choosing public schools for their children. The caste identity, we find, plays a role for the school choice decision made by the parents belonging to the economic middle class. Among the economic middle class parents, the ones from the privileged castes send their children to private schools, while the children of the parents from the disadvantaged castes are sent to public schools. The result is robust to alternative definitions of privileged and disadvantaged castes. For school quality choice, however, we find a monotonic relationship between wealth and school quality.     

Caste in 21st Century India: Competing Narratives

Recent debates regarding inclusion of caste in 2011 Census have raised questions about whether caste still matters in modern India. Ethnographic studies of the mid-20th century identified a variety of dimensions along which caste differentiation occurs. At the same time, whether this differentiation translates into hierarchy remains a contentious issue as does the persistence of caste, given the economic changes of the past two decades. Using data from a nationally representative survey of 41,554 households conducted in 2005, this paper examines the relationship between social background and different dimensions of well-being. The results suggest continued persistence of caste disparities in education, income and social networks.     

Social Affiliation and the Demand for Health Services: Caste and Child Health in South India

This paper assesses the role of social affiliation, measured by caste, in shaping investments in child health. The special setting that we have chosen for the analysis - tea estates in the South Indian High Range - allows us to control nonparametrically for differences in income, access to health services, and patterns of morbidity across low caste and high caste households. In this controlled setting, low caste households spend more on their children's health than high caste households, reversing the pattern we would expect to find elsewhere in India. Moreover, health expenditures do not vary by gender within either caste group, in contrast once again with the male preference documented throughout the country. A simple explanation, based on differences in the returns to human capital across castes in the tea estates is proposed to explain these striking results.     

Social identity and perceived income adequacy

Economists are increasingly interested in subjective well‐being, but the economic literature on perceptions of income adequacy, which is one of the factors that shape subjective well‐being, is little. Our paper fills this lacuna. We utilize nationally representative data on perceptions of amounts considered as remunerative earnings from self‐employment in India and examine how these are earnings shaped by social identity, namely, caste. We also investigate if institutional change such as the introduction of an employment guarantee scheme alters these perceptions. Finally, we examine the relationship between caste identity and actual earnings. We find that caste identity does shape both perceptions of income adequacy and actual earnings: lower‐ranked groups perceive lower amounts as being remunerative and also earn lower amounts. Further, the employment guarantee scheme alters self‐perceptions differentially for different caste groups, but in more nuanced ways than our ex‐ante beliefs.     

Applying for social programs in India: Roles of local politics and caste networks in affirmative action

India has among the most extensive affirmative action programs in the world. Depending on the State, up to 50% of jobs in the public sector are reserved for members of low castes. However, recruitment is highly discretionary, making it hard for low castes without connections to access reserved jobs and thereby benefit from affirmative action. This paper studies how having a local elected leader from the same caste affects the probability of applying for reserved jobs. The identification strategy focuses on the political reservation system at the village level that determines the caste group of the local elected leader. Taking data from three States in South India, I find that households are more likely to apply when the local elected leader is from their caste group. The evidence suggests that the impact is driven by updated beliefs regarding the probability of a successful application.     

Reversal of gender gaps in child development: Evidence from young children in India

This paper provides unique evidence of a reversal of gender gaps in cognitive development in early childhood. We find steep caste and gender gradients and few substantive changes once children enter school. The gender gap, however, reverses its sign for the upper caste, with girls performing better than boys at age 5 but thereafter following the general pattern in India of boys performing better.     

INEQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY IN EARNINGS AND CONSUMPTION EXPENDITURE: THE CASE OF INDIAN MEN

The paper associates inequality of opportunities with outcome differences that can be accounted by predetermined circumstances which lie beyond the control of an individual, such as parental education, parental occupation, caste, religion, and place of birth. The non‐parametric estimates using parental education as a measure of circumstances reveal that the opportunity share of earnings inequality in 2004–05 was 11–19 percent for urban India and 5–8 percent for rural India. The same figures for consumption expenditure inequality are 10–19 percent for urban India and 5–9 percent for rural India. The overall opportunity share estimates (parametric) of earnings inequality due to circumstances, including caste, religion, region, parental education, and parental occupation, vary from 18 to 26 percent for urban India, and from 16 to 21 percent for rural India. The overall opportunity share estimates for consumption expenditure inequality are close to the earnings inequality figures for both urban and rural areas. The analysis further finds evidence that the parental education specific opportunity share of overall earnings (and consumption expenditure) inequality is largest in urban India, but caste and geographical region also play an equally important role when rural India is considered.     

Capacity-constrained Collusive Price Discrimination in the Informal Rural Credit Markets of Nepal

The author tests two alternative models of price determination in informal rural credit markets, using LSMS data from Nepal. Strong support is found for a capacity-constrained collusive oligopoly model, where lenders have full information about actual borrowers and charge heterogeneous interest rates. Only marginal support is found for a competitive cost-pricing model with imperfect information. Interest rates vary with the observable characteristics of caste, installment period, and geographical region; and they decrease as village lending capacity increases up to a certain level. Interest rates do not depend on risk related variables such as land value and loan size.     

Economic development and the decline of rural and urban community‐based networks*

This paper studies how traditional networks in rural and urban India have responded to economic development. In rural areas, the impact of the Green Revolution on within‐network inequality has resulted in defection by the wealthiest members of caste‐based social insurance networks. In Bombay, the most able members of the caste‐based labour market networks are exiting from the traditional occupations to participate in new occupations in which individual rather than group ability is rewarded. In both cases, the weakest members of the community are left in networks that now have lowered capacity to provide services.     

Recasting Economic Inequality

Arguing that it is necessary to refine the study of Indian inequality by studying patterns of inter group disparity, this essay highlights the salience of caste for this purpose. Outlining the imperatives of an economic enquiry into contemporary caste inequality, the essay critically reviews the small body of the theoretical and empirical work, attempting to highlight the different theoretical perspectives that underlie the literature.     

The Complexities and Potential of Theorizing Gender,Caste, Race,and Class

Most economists have not yet grappled with the demands of intersectional scholarship, which recognizes the intertwined nature of gender, race, class, caste and other influences on the economic situation of individuals and groups. Among economists, feminist economists may have made the most progress and be best positioned to break further ground, though we can do better and much remains to be done. This article synthesizes the case for intersectional work, reviews the state of the economic literature, describes the contributions of the articles in this special issue of Feminist Economics on "gender, color, caste and class," and sketches directions for the future.     

Caste, Inequality, and Poverty in India

This paper analyses inequality and poverty in India within the context of caste‐based discrimination. It does so by decomposing the difference between (caste) Hindu and Scheduled Caste (SC) and Scheduled Tribe (ST) households in: their average household incomes; their probabilities of being in different income percentiles; their probabilities of being at different levels of poverty into: a “discrimination effect”, which stems from the fact that a household's income level, into which its (income‐generating) profile translates, depends on whether it is SC/ST; an “attributes (or residual) effect” which stems from the fact that there are systematic differences between SC/ST and Hindu households in their (income‐generating) profiles. The results, based on unit record data for 28,922 households, showed that at least one‐third of the average income/probability differences between Hindu and SC/ST households was due to the “unequal treatment” of the latter.     

On the governance of “not being governed”

The Art of Not Being Governed illustrates that the people of highland South East Asia were not primitive people “left behind” but instead chose their lifestyles in order to avoid the predation of lowland states. This raises the question of how these people who are ungoverned by nation states provide governance for themselves. We explore this question with two related case studies. One examines a nineteenth century Southern Indian banking caste that provided self-governance. The other examines modern-day stateless Somalia.     

Wage Discrimination in India's Informal Labor Markets: Exploring the Impact of Caste and Gender

Although there has been considerable interest in wage discrimination in India, available studies have largely dealt with formal rather than informal markets that are of little relevance for the poorest people. Focusing on India's informal labor markets leads to three findings of interest. First, gender wage discrimination is larger in informal than in formal labor markets, resulting in losses that are larger than receipts from one of the country's most important safety‐net programs. Second, economic growth will not make gender discrimination in wage labor markets disappear. Finally, contrary to what is found for gender, the hypothesis of no significant wage discrimination based on caste cannot be rejected.