https://www.ideasforindia.in/topics/urbanisation/residential-segregation-in-urban-india-and-persistence-of-caste-i.html
B.R. Ambedkar had exhorted lower-caste people to move towards cities to defy localism and benefit from the virtues of cosmopolitanism that urbanisation might provide. Using 2011 enumeration block-level Census data for five major cities in India - Bengaluru, Chennai, Delhi, Kolkata, and Mumbai - this article finds that not only are Indian cities highly segregated, but population size seems to have no association with the extent of segregation. In fact, the largest cities are some of the most segregated.
Across urban India, housing discrimination based on caste or religious identity is commonplace (Thorat et al. 2015). How widespread is such discrimination that is often attributed to apparently benign 'cultural preferences'? Anecdotal evidence about neighbourhood segregation in urban India suggests that modernisation and urbanisation have not been able to make a dent in one of the constitutive features of India’s traditional caste society – the complete segregation of residential space. However, there is little systematic country-wide data on actual patterns of neighbourhood-scale residential segregation in India. Are bigger cities likely to be less segregated than smaller towns? Are more diverse cities and towns less segregated?
Evidence from around the world has shown how residential segregation leads to a widening of social distance between groups, thereby reinforcing historical hierarchies and social prejudices. In the US, segregation of African Americans and other ethnic minority in cities has generated a rich vein of scholarship, which argues that racial segregation is inimical to the development process as it alienates the marginalised communities – socially and economically (Cutler and Glaeser 1997). More recently, Chetty et al*.* (2014) have shown that high segregation lowers the chances of social and economic mobility.
"Segregation of spaces" (Ghurye 1969) is central to caste-based social and economic marginalisation of vast swathes of India. In many parts of India, village habitations continue to be segregated as caste-based hamlets, with ‘lower’ caste groups occupying the spatial periphery. This spatial hierarchy has been central to the maintenance of social hierarchy, and also to regulation of differential access to public goods, such as drinking water (Mukherjee 1968). It was against such discriminatory practices of the social life in villages, that B.R. Ambedkar, the founding father of Indian Constitution, advocated greater migration to urban areas for the marginalised caste groups, Dalits. The promise of migration to urban areas has a major presumption inherent in it – the anonymity provided by the city shall mute the historical baggage of caste identity, replacing it with ‘class’ distinctions instead (Beteille 1997). Caste, therefore, would cease to control the spatial organisation of spaces as it does in a village (Swallow 1982). Prominent public intellectuals continue to advocate urbanisation as a panacea for caste-based spatial segregation as it is believed that ‘caste is losing, and will continue to lose, its strength’ as India urbanises (Prasad 2010). Is the urbanisation experience of modern India consistent with these prescriptions? Is caste-based spatial segregation decreasing as India rapidly urbanises?
Between the decennial Census counts of 2001 and 2011, Dalit population in urban India has increased by 40%.1 How have these historically marginalised and formerly ‘untouchable’ groups assimilated in Indian’s burgeoning urban centres? To answer this question, we need a fine-grained neighbourhood-scale analysis of spatial segregation patters – the distribution of social groups across urban neighbourhoods. However, until recently neighbourhood-scale data were not available for a systematic analysis of residential segregation patterns in urbanising India. Historically, the Census of India reports caste information as three broad aggregate categories – Scheduled Caste (SC), Scheduled Tribe (ST), and the residual Others (OTH), at the ward level. Size of a ward in urban areas is sufficiently large, and average population sizes vary across them. For example, population size of a ward could be between 1,500-6,000 in smaller towns, and 30,000-200,000 people in the larger metropolitan cities (Prasad 2006). Ward, therefore, is not the most useful spatial unit of analysis to study segregation. Yet, most of the segregation studies in India – limited by availability of administrative data at finer spatial resolutions – rely on this coarse data (Dupont 2004, Sidhwani 2015, Vithayathil and Singh 2012).
We explicate this spatial resolution problem in our recent research (Bharathi et al. 2019), and show why wards may not be the most useful spatial unit of analysis. One needs to go to finer geographic scales, such as a Census enumeration block, which we advocate as a better proxy for a neighbourhood. An enumeration block (EB), on an average, contains around 100-125 households with a total population of 650-700.2 The EB is therefore a more realistic approximation of what constitutes a ‘neighbourhood’.
Consider Figure 1, where we provide a visual representation of the EB-level population shares of SC/STs within various wards of Bengaluru.3 It is not difficult to observe that, EBs within a particular ward, are markedly heterogeneous in terms of their caste composition. There are many EBs (finer lines) with very few SC/STs. At the same time, there are clusters of substantial SC/ST population within a ward (dotted borders), which is largely inhabited by the OTH category people. The point we are trying to impress upon here is the following: when population clustering takes place at a micro-level, communities might be highly segregated even within a ward, which is diverse in terms of caste composition. Spatial segregation in urban areas, therefore, should be studied at finer geographic scales, say a street.
Using EBs as our unit of analysis, we calculate caste-based segregation for the five major Indian metropolitan cities of India – Chennai, Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, and Bengaluru. This is the first ever attempt to study caste-based residential segregation in Indian cities using the finest available spatial scale, the EBs.
We use a simple 'dissimilarity index’ to measure residential segregation. The dissimilarity metric captures the degree of ‘evenness’ of a given geographical unit compared to a more aggregated one, and represents the proportion of population that has to be moved to achieve perfect evenness. With Indian national Census data, the dissimilarity index measures how population shares (SC, ST, and OTH) at the EB or ward level are different from the larger spatial aggregates, at ward or city level, respectively.4 The index, D, varies between 0 and 1, with the zero indicating complete integration of the groups, while 1 represents the case of extreme segregations. In Table 1, we report the segregation metric for the Indian metropolitan cities.
The dissimilarity index, as computed traditionally by Vithayathil and Singh (2012), at the ward-city level is reported in column 1 to benchmark the metric at the finer scale of EB. The second column reports the dissimilarity index computed at the block-city level – a measure of how the caste composition of EBs in a city are different from that of the city as a whole. The numbers in the second column are substantially larger than the first one. The comparison between these two columns illustrates how ignoring intra-ward segregation amounts to neglect of a significant portion of segregation in a city.
The last two columns provide a direct measure of intra-ward segregation, where for each of the wards, we computed how caste compositions vary across EBs within it. Again, it is apparent that there is substantial heterogeneity within the wards regardless of the population weights used. Ranking of these cities in terms of segregation, however, remains unchanged, regardless of the metrics employed. Among the five cities, Kolkata is the most segregated, while Bengaluru is the least. There could be several reasons for why these cities have different levels of segregation, and its potential impact, which remains an open question of further research.