Abstract
Caste is a persistent driver of inequality in India, and it is generally analyzed with government-defined broad categories, such as Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe. In everyday life, however, caste is lived and experienced as jati, which is a local system of stratification. Little is known about economic inequality at the jati level. This paper uses data from poor rural districts in Bihar to explore expenditure inequality at the jati level. Inequality decompositions show much more variation between jatis than between broad caste categories. The analysis finds that even within generally disadvantaged Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, some jatis are significantly worse off than others. Consistent with previous work, the paper also finds that inequality is largely driven by inequality within jatis. This finding has implications for the implementation of large-scale poverty alleviation programs: the benefits of programs intended for disadvantaged castes are concentrated among specific jatis.
Highlights
Most of the academic literature on caste and inequality in India is based on surveys that use caste categories that are used by the government of India, such as Scheduled Caste (SC) and Scheduled Tribe (ST).i In everyday life caste identity is experienced and practiced as jāti (Srinivas 1976; Beteille 1996; Kumar and Somanathan 2017)
Our analysis relies entirely on self-reported caste identity, as reported by the head, or chief decision-maker, of the household.v We identify a jati as a distinct group in our sample if it has at least 0.5 percent of the households in the sample.vi We classify self-reported jatis into broad caste groups according to government categories: Scheduled Caste (SC), Extremely Backward Classes (EBC), Other Backward Classes (OBC), Forward Castes (FC) and Muslims.vii Table 1, panel (b) provides basic descriptive statistics on jatis, as well as the broad caste groups
This paper has examined the relationship between caste and inequality in Bihar
Summary
Most of the academic literature on caste and inequality in India is based on surveys that use caste categories that are used by the government of India, such as Scheduled Caste (SC) and Scheduled Tribe (ST).i In everyday life caste identity is experienced and practiced as jāti (jati) (Srinivas 1976; Beteille 1996; Kumar and Somanathan 2017). Though there is a declining gap in educational attainment at the primary-school level, there are persistent disparities by caste at higher levels of education and in labor markets (Desai and Kulkarni 2008; Thorat 2009; Thorat, Vanneman, Desai and Dubey 2017) This raises the important question of the extent to which total inequality is driven by jati. We know of no decomposition of inequality at the jati-level using large samples that are representative at the state level This could have significant implications for the design and impact of poverty-alleviation programs. Scheduled Tribes (ST) are less than 1 percent of our sample These results are likely not representative of the jati-structure of the state, but are representative of the population that is typically targeted for staterun poverty alleviation programs. It is important to know that little is known about the precise caste-structure of the state since there has been no rigorous caste census in the post-independence era. viii
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