Our cities are replicating rural inequality patterns

Public services are much less likely to be found in areas with high numbers of marginalised members, our studies found.

The neighbourhoods we are born in shape our aspirations and opportunities for life. Whether a person grows up with access to clean water and electricity, or to quality schools and healthcare, is largely determined by their neighbourhood. India’s policy-makers are used to thinking in aggregate terms — states, districts, and political constituencies. But for citizens, the neighbourhood is where life is lived. It is where social interactions take place, children go to school, and first jobs are found.

We found India’s cities segregated on the basis of both caste and religion, sometimes about as much as racial segregation in the United States (US).(Sanchit Khanna/HT Photo)

At Development Data Lab, we spent the last 15 years unlocking data sources that give us clearer views on policy and economic opportunities in India. We combined data from the 2011 Population Census, the 2012 Socio-Economic and Caste Census and the 2013 Economic Census on 1.5 million urban and rural neighbourhoods, their demographic composition, public services, and the economic status of the people who live there. Each of these neighbourhoods is like a city block, or a single hamlet of a village, made up of approximately 700 people.

Families stay in neighbourhoods for a long time. The data is from 2012, so it is not directly informative about current realities, but they help us understand the forces that shape how people grow up today. We especially wanted to understand the rural and urban neighbourhoods inhabited by members of India’s two largest marginalised groups — Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Muslims.

India’s villages have a long and chequered history of residential segregation and exclusion along caste and religious lines. We thought we might find a different pattern in India’s cities, where the mad churn of migration and growth are creating new spaces, communities, and economic opportunities. Instead, we found that India’s cities may be reproducing many of the old patterns of rural inequality.

We first looked at residential segregation — the extent to which people from marginalised social groups live in neighbourhoods with members of their own group. Research from around the world suggests that when people live in lower-class enclaves mostly among their own communities, they have fewer pathways to opportunity, worse access to job networks, and find it harder to break stereotypes about them in the wider population. In contrast, when members of marginalised communities live in diverse localities, they become more integrated into the life and possibilities of society at large.

Unfortunately, we found India’s cities segregated on the basis of both caste and religion, sometimes about as much as racial segregation in the United States (US). A full 26% of India’s Muslims were found to live in neighbourhoods that are more than 80% Muslim; 17% of SCs lived in neighbourhoods that are more than 80% SC.

Average SC segregation in cities was just as high as in rural areas; for Muslims, it was even higher.

This may not be that surprising, as these neighbourhoods are highly salient and noticeable; this result alone does not indicate that segregation is necessarily bad for members of these marginalised communities. But our second major finding was stark and troubling.

We found that government-supplied public services are much less likely to be found in neighbourhoods with high numbers of marginalised members. This is true for nearly every service; secondary schools, clinics and hospitals, electricity, water, and sewerage were all found to be less available in SC and Muslim neighbourhoods than in other areas in the same city. Our calculations found that an entirely SC neighbourhood is 25% less likely to have a secondary school than a non-SC neighbourhood in the same city, while an entirely Muslim neighbourhood is only half as likely to have a secondary school.

The worse economic status of SCs and Muslims does not excuse or explain these facts. The government has a responsibility to serve all its citizens, and many of these disparities hold up even after we take neighbourhood income into account. The service disparities cannot be explained by slums vs non-slums either — we found exactly the same results when we considered only non-slum neighbourhoods. Our findings lend weight to the longstanding complaint of SC and Muslim communities about the difficulty of getting the state to pay attention to their neighbourhoods, outside of election-time handouts.

Neighbourhood disparities this stark mean that inequality is getting transmitted to the next generation. A child growing up in a 100% Muslim area can expect to get two fewer years of education than a child growing up in a non-marginalised neighbourhood. Kids living in SC localities face a penalty only slightly less severe. These effects hold for everyone living in Muslim and SC areas, not just for Muslims and SCs.

We did find some reasons for hope: Younger cities are less segregated than older cities, a sign that recent social and cultural changes might be leading to a more integrated and equal future. Our home country, the US, is still torn apart by the poisonous legacy of hundreds of years of racial segregation and inequality. India’s cities are still young enough to make a better set of choices. By better understanding inequality and access to public services at the neighbourhood level, policymakers can build cities in which every Indian, regardless of caste or religion, has an equal opportunity to succeed.

Sam Asher is an associate professor of economics at Imperial College London Business School Paul Novosad is an associate professor of economics at Dartmouth College. The views expressed are personal