Is Merit The Reason For Caste-based Poverty and Backwardness?

A little bit of time travel to 2009/10 triggered by this article: Congress ups the ante on quotas.  Two reviews of the book "Blocked By Caste".

The economics of caste inequity.  From the latter:

Reactions to the caste question are fairly predictable in India. The average (upper caste) response is that the policy of reservations has gone on far too long and that discrimination is very much a thing of the past. As to why certain social groups remain extremely poor and backward despite the legal safeguards, the usual explanation is that Dalits are either not well educated or do not have the merit to make it to good jobs.

Blocked by Caste should come as an eye-opener to those who subscribe to this view. It proves that the social and economic exclusion of Dalits (and Muslims) continues to be pervasive in a nation that speaks the global language of meritocracy and level playing fields but has been unable to shed historical caste prejudices. 

...What it does reveal is that the dominant Brahminical ideology, which categorises the Dalit and the Muslim minority as the ‘other’, has tinted the view of the private sector to a large degree. Economic discrimination is a subject that has received little attention and this book focuses on contemporary patterns of discrimination in various markets, labour in particular, along with discrimination in the delivery of public goods and services by the government.

...Thorat and Paul Attewell, professor of sociology at the University of New York, used a similar methodology in India to arrive at similar conclusions. They sent out three sets of applications for jobs advertised in major dailies over a 13-month period, using a stereotypical high caste Hindu name, a recognisable Muslim name and a distinctive Dalit name. The consistent result: applicants with Dalit and Muslim names had a significantly lower chance of a positive outcome than persons with a high caste Hindu name.

IT companies were included too.  How can such visceral attitudes be changed or at least be circumvented?  

Caste & the labour market :

A useful four-fold classification of the types of discrimination is proposed by Thorat and Newman: complete exclusion, selective inclusion, unfavourable inclusion, and selective exclusion. Complete exclusion would occur, for example, if Dalits were totally excluded from purchase of land in certain residential areas. Selective inclusion refers to differential treatment or inclusion in markets, such as disparity in payment of wages to Dalit workers and other workers. Unfavourable inclusion or forced inclusion refers to tasks in which Dalits are incorporated based on traditional caste practices, such as bonded labour. Lastly, selective exclusion refers to exclusion of those involved in “polluting occupations” (such as leather tanning or sanitary work) from certain jobs and services.

There is a body of research on discrimination in rural areas and on the continuation of caste barriers to economic and social mobility in village India. There is a myth, however, that caste does not matter in the urban milieu and that, with the anonymity of the big city and with education and associated job and occupational mobility (assisted by affirmative action), traditional caste-based discriminatory practices disappear. This book explodes that myth in a set of chapters that focus on the formal labour market.

All italics mine.  

Mobile Phone Ownership Among the Poor in India

Is lower than in Pakistan , Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Thailand.  ‘More poor people own mobile phones, but productive use still a far cry'

According to a 2011 study, “Teleuse@BOP4” by LIRNEasia, an ICT policy and regulation think tank active in the Asia Pacific region, while there has been a marked rise in mobile phone use by BoP persons in rural and urban India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Thailand, unfortunately, the device's use is primarily restricted to making or receiving calls or SMSs. In some cases, it is also used as a substitute for radio or as a torch.

...

“The survey in these six countries found that except in Java (Indonesia) BoP mobile ownership was higher in urban areas. But, in India, it was the lowest in both rural and urban areas, at 37 per cent, compared with 65 per cent in Pakistan, 49 per cent in Bangladesh, 71 per cent in Sri Lanka and 89 per cent in Thailand,” says Mr Samarajiva.

This Too Happens In Bangalore

Harrowing tales of children rescued from begging

The stories of child beggars, who were rescued in the City on Thursday, are heartrending. Though in a few cases, the parents had pushed their children into begging, in a majority of cases, they had handed over their children to handlers, who in turn forced them into begging.

In many cases, the mothers used to hand over their children to the handlers and go to work. The handlers would come in the evening, leave the children at their homes, give the mothers some money and go away. Such children used to weep and quarrel with their mothers later on. 

The mothers would feed them with a high dose of cough syrup or other medicines to put them to so sleep, the officer said. In some cases, the parents of rescued children expressed utter shock on knowing that their children had been pressed into begging.

Details: Over 200 kids rescued from begging racket.  Of the rescued children, 64 were boys above 5 years, 40 were girls above 5 years and 106 were below 5 years, apparently.  Sad stories.

Nothing's Trickling Down

Alok Ray, former professor of economics at IIM, Calcutta, writes in DH: Where is inclusiveness?.  He notes India's growth is not all that inclusive.  We lag behind in adult literacy, life expectancy, malnutrition, number of people below the international poverty line, to take just a few indicators.  Job growth seems to have slowed down post-liberalisation:  

One area of major concern is that post-liberalisation, job creation which is a major mechanism of inclusion of more people in economic prosperity, has been slowing down. Employment growth fell sharply in the post-reform years, from 2.6 per cent per annum over 1983-1993 to 1.2 per cent over 1993-2000.

The fall in employment growth rate was specially concentrated in organised sectors (particularly in the public sector). This trend has been reversed to some extent as the latest available National Sample Survey (NSS) data show employment growth during the period 2000-05 was 2.7 per cent per annum. But, then again, the growth in jobs has been mostly concentrated (about 87 per cent) in the unorganised sector.

In terms of equality we seem to be doing well, which is quite surprising.  It does look like inequality is rising (see the graph in this wikipedia article).  And then there is this factoid: The total value of the assets of the country's five billionaires equalled those of the bottom 300 million people (link).  C P Chandrasekhar sums it up concisely, as he writes about a well-ignored recent study of Indian poverty, in The Hindu:

Finally, it has been known that once we went beyond pure income measures of poverty and looked at other indicators of deprivation, not only was the incidence of deprivation substantial in terms of indicators varying from literacy to child malnutrition, but the progress in alleviating certain forms of deprivation had slowed during the high growth years. The problem is not just that India has significantly underperformed when addressing poverty and deprivation over 60-plus years of post-Independence development, but that progress has slowed in precisely those years when the surpluses available to tackle this problem has increased substantially. The problem is not inadequate growth, but one of institutional inadequacy. It is also one of an increasing reluctance of the elite to address those inadequacies and, therefore, of the failure of what is undisputedly one of the most remarkable experiments with parliamentary democracy.

Relatedly : Inclusive Growth, Lip Service Only

Inclusive Growth, Lip Service Only

A commission setup to 'review the status of the unorganised/informal sector in India' submits its report.  The report paints a bleak picture of the current situation - "77% of the population in 2004-05 had to make do, on an average, with no more than Rs 20 perday per capita" -  and makes some recommendations.  And the commission winds up after submitting the report.  In April 2009.  End of story.  

Inclusive growth indeed.  Link to EPW article on it: India's Social Question in a State of Denial (PDF).  The actual report is here (PDF).

Two Worlds

From Churumuri:

“Ironically, the era of the free market has led to the most successful secessionist struggle ever waged in India—the secession of the middle and upper classes to a country of their own, somewhere up in the stratosphere where they merge with the rest of the world’s elite. This Kingdom in the Sky is a complete universe in itself, hermetically sealed from the rest of India.

“It has its own newspapers, films, television programmes, morality plays, transport systems, malls and intellectuals. And in case you are beginning to think it’s all joy-joy, you’re wrong.

“It also has its own tragedies, its own environmental issues (parking problems, urban air pollution); its own class struggles. An organisation called Youth for Equality, for example, has taken up the issue of Reservations, because it feels upper castes are discriminated against by India’s pulverised lower castes.

“It has its own people’s movements and candle-light vigils (Justice for Jessica, the model who was shot in a bar) and even its own People’s Car (the Wagon for the Volks launched by the Tata Group recently). It even has its own dreams that take the form of TV advertisements in which Indian CEOs (smeared with Fair & Lovely Face Cream, Men’s) buy over international corporations, including an imaginary East India Company.

“They are ushered into their plush new offices by fawning white women (who look as though they’re longing to be laid, the final prize of conquest) and applauding white men, ready to make way for the new kings. Meanwhile, the crowd in the stadium roars to its feet (with credit cards in its pockets) chanting ‘India! India!’”

That's Arundhati Roy describing one of the two worlds. Here's The Hindu (30 Jan 2008) describing part of the other (the entire page is missing from the online edition, so no link):

Cholera seems to have revisited the city with detection of five cases in a private hospital and 24 samples suspected for cholera sent to Public Health Institute (PHI) for confirmation. On Tuesday, 281 fresh cases of gastroenteritis were also reported, taking the total to 819 since the first case was reported in Bharathinagar on Sunday.
...
The BWSSB (Bangalore Water Supply & Seweraage Board) release said: "Some contamination has been detected from 15 houses on Thimmaiah Road Cross. These houses had directly taken water supply connections from the public tap through a GI pipe across a manhole filled with sewage. The water supply to these households was contaminated as the GI pipe was corroded."
...
In many populated areas where roads are very narrow, sewage lines and drinking water pipelines have been laid side by side, which could lead to contamination, sources said.

"This is a repeated experience in Bangalore. Besides the issue of adjacent pipes leading to contamination, there is also that of open drainage. Most urban slum areas bordering storm water drains are contaminated with sewage which even seeps into the groud water," says Thelma Narayanan of Community Health Cell.

And this:

From Ground Zero: Neelsandra and Bharatinagar

As if scraping together a living were not enough, residents have to cope with medical expenses due to contaminated water
You can barely manage to fit in a two-wheeler on many roads in Neelsandra, hardly a couple of kilometres from the upmarket Koramangala. The other streets are hardly motorable, grappling as they do for space with mounds of black slush and bone-rattling potholes. The narrow roads mean that water and sanitary lines are placed close to each other, a situation pregnant with potential for disaster.

A disaster that has unravelled over the past three days as scores of people continue to fall ill afflicted with suspected gastroenteritis. Mohammed Hussain from R.K. Gardens laughs sardonically when you ask him why gastroenteritis has struck now if conditions in the area had always been so appalling. "We are in the news only now. But come here in the evening and you will see that the ones doing brisk business are private doctors who have long queues outside their clinics."

More:

'The poor are the worst victims'

"Drinking water is not safe for the poor in Bangalore. This is the fundamental issue and the outbreak of gastroenteritis at Bharathinagar is only the symptom of a larger malaise," says Isaac Arul Selva of Jan Sahayog, an organisation that works on urban infrastructure issues.

"Cases of cholera and gastroenteritis regularly occur in slums and lower-middle class localities. They become news only when the numbers are big," he says. Nayandanahalli, Badarayanapura, Koramangala Slum and Andhra Colony are areas where this is an "annual feature," he says.

Jan Sahayog did a study at 35 slums in Bangalore in 2005 that revealed that 75 per cent of water samples were not potable owing to chemical and biological contamination.