New Delhi: India remains deeply segregated along caste and religious lines, with Muslim and Scheduled Caste (SC) neighbourhoods facing systematically poorer access to public services, according to a new working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Titled ‘Residential Segregation and Unequal Access to Local Public Services in India: Evidence from 1.5m Neighbourhoods’, the study analyses around 15 lakh urban and rural neighbourhoods using data from the 2011 Population Census, the 2011-12 Socioeconomic and Caste Census and the 2013 Economic Census.
The authors — Sam Asher, Kritarth Jha, Paul Novosad, Anjali Adukia and Brandon Tan — find that residential segregation among Muslims and SCs in India is among the highest globally. Muslims and SCs have notably segregated residential patterns, slightly lower than Black Americans and non-White people in England and Wales, but higher than minority groups in almost all other comparison countries, the paper notes.
In urban India, 26 per cent of Muslims live in neighbourhoods that are more than 80 per cent Muslim, while 17 per cent of urban SCs live in neighbourhoods that are more than 80 per cent SC. The study uses standard measures such as dissimilarity and isolation indices to assess segregation, finding that Muslims are relatively more segregated in cities than in rural areas.
The research highlights that segregation translates into unequal access to public infrastructure. Compared with a 0 per cent Muslim neighbourhood, a 100 per cent Muslim neighbourhood in the same city is 10 per cent less likely to have piped water and only half as likely to have a secondary school.
A fully Muslim neighbourhood has 13 per cent fewer primary schools, 46 per cent fewer secondary schools and 20 per cent fewer health centres than a neighbourhood with no Muslims, the study states. Increasing the Muslim share of a neighbourhood by 50 percentage points is associated with a 22 per cent lower likelihood of having a public secondary school.
Similar trends are observed in SC-dominated areas, particularly where the SC population exceeds 20 per cent. Across categories such as schools, healthcare, sanitation, piped water and electricity, access is consistently worse in neighbourhoods with larger shares of marginalised groups.
The study notes that private providers do not compensate for the shortfall in public services. It also finds that cross-neighbourhood allocation of public facilities is more unfavourable to Muslims than to SCs, suggesting that affirmative action policies targeting SCs may have had some positive effect on district-level resource distribution.
Researchers argue that inequality at the neighbourhood level is often masked by district or state-level data. Two localities within the same town may vote for the same representatives and pay similar taxes, yet experience starkly different access to clinics, schools and utilities.
Urban segregation, the study finds, mirrors rural patterns, indicating that historical settlement norms persist despite urbanisation. Segregation is higher in larger, poorer and older cities, and in areas with a history of Hindu-Muslim violence.
The findings underscore the need for neighbourhood-level policy interventions, warning that aggregate statistics risk obscuring entrenched disparities and leaving marginalised communities under-served.