Isolated by Caste: Neighbourhood-Scale Residential Segregation in Indian Metros

By N. Bharathi, D. Malghan, Andaleeb Rahman. 2018

We present the first ever neighbourhood-scale portrait of caste-based residential segregation in Indian cities. Residential segregation studies in Indian cities have relied on ward-level data. We demonstrate in this paper that wards cannot approximate an urban neighborhood, and that they are heterogeneous. For a typical ward, the neighbourhood-ward dissimilarity index is greater than the ward-city dissimilarity index. Using 2011 enumeration block (EB) level census data for five major cities in India – Bengaluru, Chennai, Delhi, Kolkata, and Mumbai – we show how patterns of caste-based urban residential segregation operate in contemporary India. We also present the first visual snapshot of caste-based residential segregation in an Indian city using georeferenced EB level data for Bengaluru. Besides implications for policy, our analysis also points to the need for publicly available, geospatially-linked neighborhood-scale census data that includes data on economic class for a spatial understanding of economic and social stratification within Indian cities. En

Subfields: Social Sciences & Humanities

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Citations in the corpus

• Re-imagining Algorithmic Fairness in India and Beyond (2021, background): “Many Indian zip codes are heterogeneous, with slums and posh houses abutting in the same area [20, 36], unlike the rather homogeneous zip codes in the West from the segregated past [50].”