A report has excavated the stark reality of a social order segregated along caste and religious lines, revealing residential separation across urban and rural landscapes, where public services, water, healthcare, education and social welfare, in neighbourhoods predominantly inhabited by Muslims and Scheduled Castes, are systematically curtailed or dispensed in scant measure, thereby entrenching marginalisation and structural inequity.
The study, published by the Massachusetts-based non-profit National Bureau of Economic Research, draws upon granular data from nearly 1.5 million neighbourhoods across the country and concludes that the scale of segregation along caste and religious lines is comparable to contemporary levels of racial segregation in the United States.
The findings suggest that India’s urban and rural geographies alike are etched with patterns of exclusion that have hardened over decades, producing clusters of demographic homogeneity that mirror older hierarchies of social stratification.
According to the paper, 26 per cent of India’s Muslims reside in neighbourhoods that are more than 80 per cent Muslim, while 17 per cent of Scheduled Castes live in areas that are more than 80 per cent SC.
The data further reveals that Scheduled Caste segregation in cities is as pronounced as it is in rural regions, while segregation among Muslims is even more acute in urban spaces, thereby unsettling the presumption that cities necessarily dilute inherited social divides.
Yet it is not mere demographic clustering that alarms the authors, but the material consequences that flow from it, since government services — including secondary schools, clinics and hospitals, electricity, piped water and sewerage — are described as being “systematically worse” in marginalised neighbourhoods when compared with other localities within the same cities.
These disparities, the paper notes, are statistically significant and substantial, suggesting that spatial segregation is accompanied by institutional neglect rather than neutral administration.
The educational toll appears particularly severe, for children raised in these segregated enclaves are shown to fare markedly worse than their counterparts in more heterogeneous neighbourhoods.
A child growing up in a locality that is entirely Muslim can expect to attain two fewer years of schooling than one raised in a neighbourhood with no Muslim residents, while children in predominantly Scheduled Caste areas face only a marginally smaller educational penalty.
The study estimates that neighbourhood effects account for roughly half of the urban educational disadvantage experienced by SC and Muslim children, thereby underscoring how geography can operate as a silent yet formidable determinant of life chances.
Authored by Sam Asher, Kritarth Jha, Anjali Adukia, Paul Novosad and Brandon Tan, the paper relies on data collected between 2011 and 2013; however, the authors caution that the residential patterns delineated in the analysis are unlikely to be transient aberrations, since they have crystallised through decades of migration, policy decisions and social practice.