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Caste and Space in Indian Cities
Vamsi Vakulabharanam** and Sripad Motiram.
University of Massachusetts, 2023.
Excerpt – This paper analyzes the interaction between caste relations and city space, and its impact on economic development in Indian cities. Much of the literature on caste has focused on rural India, although there is a recent and growing literature that examines caste and caste-based discrimination in cities. We focus on this strand, particularly, studies that have examined castebased residential segregation in cities. Recent studies have argued that Indian cities are highly segregated along caste lines.
more info – https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Vamsi-Vakulabharanam/publication/375489604_Caste_and_Space_in_Indian_Cities/links/654c0d87b86a1d521bc7a1c4/Caste-and-Space-in-Indian-Cities.pdf
courtesy – PARI
The gendered practices of the upwardly mobile in India
Megan N. Reed.
Social Science Research, 2021.
Abstract: This study examines the relationship between economic mobility and the practice of female seclusion in Indian households using the India Human Development Survey (IHDS), a nationally representative panel survey. Women from households which became wealthier between survey waves were found to have increased restrictions on their physical mobility as well as higher odds of practicing head-covering or purdah.
These results held even after the inclusion of controls for changes in household composition, health of the woman, and her labor force participation. Stratified fixed effects regression analyses revealed that mobility-induced female seclusion was primarily practiced in poorer communities, in rural areas, and among the less-educated. The findings suggest that economically mobile households may use female seclusion as a strategy to signal household status.
URL : https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0049089X21001290
Courtesy : ScienceDirect
Birds of a feather flock together? Diversity and the spread of Covid-19 cases in India
Udayan Rathore, Upasak Das and Prasenjit Sarkhel
Global Development Institute Working Paper, 2021-053
Arresting Covid-19 infections requires collective action that is difficult to achieve in a socially and economically diverse setting. Using district-level data from India, we examined the effects of caste and religious fragmentation, along with economic inequality, on the growth rate of reported Covid-19 cases. Our findings indicate the positive effects of caste homogeneity, while demonstrating a limited impact of economic inequality and religious homogeneity. The gains from higher caste homogeneity eroded gradually with the unlocking procedure after the nationwide lockdown but community cohesion through caste remained dominant in rural areas even when mobility restrictions were withdrawn. Our findings indicate that planners should prioritise public health interventions in areas that are heterogeneous in terms of caste to compensate for the absence of community cohesion. The importance of our study lies in empirically validating the causal pathway between homogeneity and infection growth, thereby providing a basis for zoning infection-prone areas and advocating a differentiated policy response.
URL: https://www.gdi.manchester.ac.uk/research/publications/gdi-working-papers/2020-053/
Courtesy: GDI
The gender of debt and credit: Insights from rural Tamil Nadu
E. Rebou, lI.Guérin, C.J. Nordman
World Development, Volume 142, June 2021
The champions of financial inclusion regret women’s lack of access to credit, while critics of financialization, by contrast, claim that women have become overly indebted. But little is actually known about women’s debt/credit in quantitative terms, mostly due to a lack of data. This descriptive paper uses first-hand survey data from southern India disaggregated by sex in order to analyze the gender of debt and its interplay with caste and poverty, based on descriptive statistics and econometric results. We show that women are heavily indebted, first and foremost to informal sources, alongside microcredit. While men are much higher earners, they borrow much less in relative terms. Furthermore, women prominently – and markedly more so than men – borrow in order to make ends meet; productive investment largely remains a male practice. Lastly, women of the poorest and lowest-caste households have the heaviest borrowing responsibilities, managing the highest proportions of household debt. On a theoretical level, these results highlight the gendered earmarking of debt and credit: male and female debts/credits do not have the same meanings and uses. They also confirm the gendered dimension of behavior, in as much as women’s behavior is constrained by family affiliation, poverty level and caste, all of which affects men much less. Last, in terms of policy implications, these results put into question the specific targeting of women by microcredit policies, likely to strengthen the association between debt and poverty for women, and in particular to exacerbate female responsibilities for managing scarcity.
URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X20304915
Courtesy: Sciencedirect
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.
URL: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/rode.12711
Courtesy: Wiley online library
The Impact of Caste: A Missing Link in the Literature on Stunting in India
Rajesh Ramachandran, Ashwini Deshpande
IZA DP No. 14173, March 2021
India is home to some 120 million children under the age of 5, 36 percent of whom are chronically malnourished. The associated high prevalence of stunting has generated a stream of research explaining why chronic malnourishment in India is higher than in poorer countries of sub-Saharan Africa. Surprisingly, this body of research has overlooked a crucial feature of chronic malnourishment in India – that is, the difference in stunting incidence across caste and religious groups. A comparison by social categories reveals that not only are the height gaps between social groups in India two to three times larger than the India–Africa gap, but that children from the socio-economically dominant group, the upper caste Hindus, are even taller than their African counterparts. We find significant caste gaps in child height in samples that are balanced on an extensive set of covariates. We also show that height gaps are higher in areas where discrimination is more prevalent. Our results suggest that incorporating considerations of caste is essential to understanding the problem of chronic malnourishment in India today.
Courtesy: IZA
Who Is in Justice? Caste, Religion and Gender in the Courts of Bihar over a Decade
Abstract : Bihar is widely regarded as one of India’s poorest and most divided states. It has also been the site of many social movements that have left indelible marks on the state’s politics and identity. Little is currently known about how structural inequalities have affected the functioning of formal systems of justice in the state.
This paper uses a novel dataset of more than one million cases filed at the Patna high court between 2009 and 2019 together with a variety of supplementary data to analyze the role of religion, caste and gender in the high court of Bihar. The analysis finds that the courts are not representative of the Bihari population.
Muslims, women and scheduled castes are consistently under-represented. The practice of using “caste neutral” names is on the rise. Though there is little evidence of “matching” between judges and petitioners or judges and filing advocates on the basis of names, there is evidence that petitioners and their advocates match on the basis of identity such as the use of “caste neutral” names.
These results suggest that the social movements that disrupted existing social structures in the past may have inadvertently created new social categories that reinforce networks and inequalities in the formal justice system.
URL: https://www.worldbank.org/en/research/brief/world-bank-policy-research-working-papers
Courtesy: World Bank
A Division of Laborers : Identity and Efficiency in India
NGOs as Social Movements: Policy Narratives, Networks and the Performance of Dalit Rights in South India
Development and Change, Volume52, Issue1, January 2021
Donor‐funded development NGOs are sometimes portrayed as co‐opting, privatizing or depoliticizing citizen action or social movements. This much is implied by the term ‘NGOization’. Alternatively, NGOs can be seen as bearers of rights‐based work increasingly threatened by tighter regulation or substitution by corporate social responsibility models of development. This article engages critically with both perspectives. It traces the role of NGOs and their funders in agenda setting, specifically in bringing the previously excluded issue of caste discrimination into development policy discourse in the form of a Dalit‐rights approach in Tamil Nadu, south India. The authors explore the institutional processes of policy making and NGO networking involved, the alliances, entanglements of NGOs and social movements, and the performativity of NGO Dalit rights. But at the same time, the article illustrates how NGO institutional systems have constrained or failed to sustain such identity‐based claims to entitlement. In Nancy Fraser’s terms, the article explores success and failure in addressing ‘first‐order’ issues of justice, that is rights to resources (in this case, land), and in tackling ‘second‐order’ injustices concerning the framing of who counts (who can make a claim as a rights holder) and how (by what procedures are claims and contests staged and resolved). This draws attention to the important but fragile achievements of NGOs’ discursive framings that give Dalits the ‘right to have rights’.
URL: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/dech.12614
Courtesy: Wiley online library
Caste, Social Networks and Variety Adoption
Ishika Gupta , Prakashan Chellattan Veettil, Stijn Speelman
Journal of South Asian Development
Social networks influence technology diffusion but targeting formal leaders (institutional central nodes) may lead to distributional consequences. This paper analyzes the role of informal social networks in technology diffusion in a socially hierarchical caste-based society. Often, information flow and technology diffusion are constrained by social and economic boundaries where informal nodes such as caste play a very decisive role in everyday life. Proper targeting and dissemination of technology to the marginalized sections of society are very important for their development. We observed that only one-fourth of farmers cultivate newer varieties which include hybrids and recently released high yielding varieties. The results showed that individuals belonging to marginal groups are influential and act as informal leaders when they are the dominant caste in the village. Progressive farmers are found to fail in disseminating new varieties, and targeting influential informal leaders who belong to the dominant caste of the village appears to be a better strategy. Among non-dominant caste members, influential leaders belonging to Other Backward Classes (OBCs) or Scheduled Tribes (STs) are more desirable targets than other caste groups. The more concentrated a network is in terms of its caste composition, the faster will be the spread of any technology.
URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/SAD/current
Courtesy: Sage
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