New Delhi: Urging Dalits to move to cities in keeping with the aspiration that urbanisation will break the shackles of the caste system, Bhim Rao Ambedkar, the father of the Indian Constitution once said, “What is a village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow mindedness and communalism.”
However, according to a research conducted over 15 lakh urban dwellings in India, rapid urbanisation does not efface caste and religion, with marginalised communities segregated and deprived of essential services.
Five developmental economists from five prestigious institutions around the world — Sam Asher from Imperial College, London, Kritarth Jha from Washington-based Development Lab, Paul Novosad from Dartmouth College, Anjali Adukia from University of Chicago, and Brandon Tan from International Monetary Fund — collaborated to quantify segregation in urban India. The details of their findings, as put together in a paper titled ‘Residential Segregation and Unequal Access to Local Public Services in India: Evidence from 1.5m Neighborhoods’, was shared by Novosad on Twitter this month.
📣 New working paper on residential segregation in India. We’ve been working for 5 years on this.
8 facts about residential segregation in India, from new administrative data. The situation is not great 🧵 1/N pic.twitter.com/wcBaQVDftr
— Paul Novosad (@paulnovosad) June 15, 2023
According to the researchers, in Indian cities, the segration of neighbourhoods dominated by Muslims and Scheduled Castes (SCs) from the rest is as wide as that between areas dominated by the Caucasian and African-American populations in the US.
Further, the likelihood of availing government facilities drops in areas where SCs and Muslims are in majority and their children fare much worse than students from other non-marginalised groups living in the same city, claimed the researchers.
In order to better understand the report’s findings, it is key to understand what and how the authors were measuring.
The authors used the Socio Economic Caste Census (SECC) by the Ministry of Rural Development which collected data on several factors between 2012-14. The SECC recorded the information (mostly in 2012), which is now “available for policy, research and for implementing various development programmes”, according to the ministry website. The SECC included a column on religion, but its data wasn’t made public, so the authors identified Muslims from their first names and last names.
To measure segregation, the authors constructed an index, which, in simple terms, measured the fraction of marginalised group members that would have to move to achieve an equal distribution across neighborhoods. Each neighbourhood was defined at a survey block level, which is about 125 households or 700 people.
In order to better compare this with neighbourhoods in the US, the authors scaled their calculations up to 4,000 people per neighbourhood. To measure the level of public services, the authors calculated how the availability of services such as schooling, healthcare, etc changes with a change in the share of Dalits or Muslims in a neighbourhood.
What the analysis found, claimed the study findings, was that in smaller neighbourhoods (up to 700 people), Muslims in Indian cities were even more segregated than those of African-Americans in US cities. However, when using the scaled up measure of 4,000 people, the levels of segregation more closely matched what was seen in the US.
“By both measures, we can conclude that segregation in India, particularly of Muslims, is comparable in magnitude to that of modern US Blacks,” the report reads.
The report further claims that the SCs are relatively more integrated compared to Muslims, with only 17 per cent urban SCs living in neighbourhoods with more than 80 per cent SC population. There were at least 26 per cent Muslims who lived in neighbourhoods with more than 80 per cent Muslim population, according to the study.
The availability of secondary schooling also deteriorated in Indian cities where Muslims were concentrated, claim the researchers. According to the report, a 50 per cent increase in the Muslim population in an area resulted in a 22 per cent lower likelihood of that area having a public (government) school secondary school.
“Neighbourhoods with a greater than 50 per cent Muslim share stand out for being particularly underprovisioned; there are not so many of these neighbourhoods in India, but… a large share of Muslims live in them. Rural locations look broadly similar, with the most Muslim neighbourhoods having substantially fewer schools,” the report claims.
The findings are similar for SC-majority areas, the report adds. In areas with fewer than 20 per cent SC population, secondary school access didn’t change much, but when the share of SC population went above 20 per cent, the accessibility to secondary school dropped significantly. In fact, neighbourhoods with 50 per cent SC populations tend to have similar school access as areas with 50 per cent Muslims, the study claims.
The report mentions that other public services, particularly infrastructural ones, such as cleaner water, closed drainage and electricity access, become “systematically less available” in Muslim and SC neighbourhoods. But quantifiably, the relationship between SC areas and the delivery of these services was even worse than in Muslim areas, the report suggests.
It says, “Living in a marginalised group neighbourhood is associated with much worse outcomes regardless of an individual’s identity.”
The authors also claim that Muslim youngsters aged 17-18 who live in 100 per cent Muslim neighbourhoods, tend to have 2.1 fewer years of schooling than those where 0 percent Muslims live. Likewise, for SCs, the effect is similar, but it’s also explained by the economic factors of their families, the report says.
“Young people in SC neighbourhoods have systematically worse outcomes than those in non-SC neighbourhoods—but the difference is mostly explained by the economic status of their families,” the report says.
“This does not rule out a negative causal effect of growing up in an SC neighbourhood on child outcomes, because those parent outcomes could themselves be caused by living in a bad neighbourhood.”
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Way forward
With 34 per cent Indians living in urban areas, as per the latest Census (2011), the country is urbanising at a rapid pace and according to some estimates, more than half of the country is likely to live in urban areas by 2050. In such a scenario, a growing disparity in delivery of public services and segregation might pose a threat to the very idea of castes and differences being minimised.
The biggest limitation of this paper, as described by the authors, is that it has no option but to use 2012-14 data from the SECC. Any change that happened to India’s urban demographics since then has not been documented by this paper. Moreover, with a lack of discriminatory policies unlike the US, India has fewer “harmful policies” to change to address this issue, the paper says.
“That living standards are so much lower in SC and Muslim enclaves suggests that, as elsewhere, spatial concentration of marginalised groups may limit their economic opportunities,” the report says.
It adds: “Modern India has never had the government regulations, such as redlining (discriminatory practice of withholding services such as loans, mortgage from people in an area marked ‘hazardous’ due to their racial makeup), that contributed to racial segregation in the United States—there are thus fewer overtly harmful policies to remove.”
“However, housing discrimination in India’s cities is widely documented and has even been explicitly tolerated by the judiciary, echoing patterns from a too recent era in the US,” it further says.
(Edited by Smriti Sinha)
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