The findings have come to light even as Prime Minister Narendra Modi was denying the existence of any kind of discrimination in the country during his joint press conference with United States President Joe Biden at the White House.
Waquar Hasan | Clarion India
NEW DELHI — The population of Muslims and Scheduled Castes (SCs) in India are highly segregated and the government-supplied public services are less likely to be found in neighbourhoods dominated by them, a recent study has found.
The study titled “Residential Segregation and Unequal Access to Local Public Services in India: Evidence from 1.5m Neighbourhoods” was conducted by the Development Data Lab, a Washington-based data and research institute. The study, released in June, is authored by academics and researchers Sam Asher, Kritarth Jha, Anjali Adukia, Paul Novosad and Brandon Tan.
“Government-supplied public services are less likely to be found in neighbourhoods with high numbers of SCs and Muslims. This is true for nearly every service that we could measure: secondary schools, clinics and hospitals, electricity, water, and sewerage are all systematically worse in SC and Muslim neighbourhoods than in other neighbourhoods in the very same cities,” found the study.
It noted that the only exception was for urban primary schools, which are more common in urban SC neighbourhoods (but less common in rural SC neighbourhoods, and in both urban and rural Muslim neighbourhoods). The differences in service access are statistically significant and substantial.
The findings have come to light even as Prime Minister Narendra Modi was denying the existence of any kind of discrimination in the country during his joint press conference with United States President Joe Biden at the White House.
“Our government runs on the fundamental principles of this Constitution. We have proved that democracy can deliver. When I say deliver it means there is no place for discrimination on the grounds of caste, creed, gender, religion,” Modi said on 23 June when he was asked about the safety of the minorities in India.
The study paper documented the issues related to three subjects: (1) Residential segregation of Scheduled Caste and Muslim communities across 1.5 million Indian neighbourhoods, (2) Relative access to public services in Scheduled Caste and Muslim neighbourhoods, and (3) Child outcomes in those neighbourhoods.
According to the study, India’s cities have a high level of segregation on the basis of both caste and religion — about as much as current levels of black/white segregation in the United States. While this level of segregation is substantial, it is considerably less than US segregation at its peak in the 1960s and 1970s.
“Twenty-six per cent of India’s Muslims live in neighbourhoods that are more than 80% Muslim; 17% of SCs live in neighbourhoods that are more than 80% SC. Scheduled Caste segregation in cities is just as high as it is in rural areas, and it is even higher for Muslims,” it said.
The study also shows that children growing up in SC and Muslim neighbourhoods fare worse than children in non-marginalised neighbourhoods in the same cities. This is true even for non-SC non-Muslim children growing up in SC and Muslim neighbourhoods.
“A child growing up in a 100% Muslim neighbourhood can expect to obtain two fewer years of education than a child growing up in a 0% Muslim neighbourhood. Kids living in SC neighbourhoods face a penalty only slightly smaller. The neighbourhood effect explains about half of the urban educational disadvantage of SC and Muslim children,” it said.
