The presentation will show how residential caste-segregation is independent of city size, using the first-ever large-scale evidence of neighbourhood-resolution data from 147 of the largest cities in contemporary India (the sample includes all cities in India with at least 0.3 million residents in 2011). This analysis sheds new light on one of the central conundrums in Indian urbanism — the persistence of caste segregation across the country, and across cities of varying sizes. It documents how patterns of residential caste segregation in the largest metropolitan centres with over 10 million residents closely track patterns in much smaller cities that are nearly two orders-of-magnitude smaller. This finding punctures a hole in one of the central normative promises of India’s urbanisation — the gradual withering of traditional caste-based segregation. These national findings are complemented by a unique census-scale micro-data containing detailed elementary caste (jati) information for nearly five million urban households in Karnataka. The analysis provides further fine-grained evidence of how segregation within the wards at census-block scales accounts for a significant part of the city scale patterns of segregation and is a central driver of ghettoisation of the most spatially marginalised groups in urban India — Muslims and Dalits. The authors offer several hypotheses and explanations and discuss implications for urban planning, policy, as well as broader modernisation theories.
About the speaker: Andaleeb Rahman is currently a Postdoctoral Associate at Cornell University. His research interest lies in the area of food policy and ethnic politics. He recently co-authored a book, Transforming Food Systems for a Rising India, which was published by Palgrave Macmillan. Currently, he is working on another book project tentatively titled, Future of India’s Social Welfare Program. Andaleeb’s research on ethnic politics investigates the role of diversity for development. In a series of inter-related papers, this research calls into question the identity-agnosticism in debates around diversity in a hierarchical society. Andaleeb received his PhD from the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Mumbai. He has also worked at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), Bangalore.
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