• 26 % of Muslims and 17% of SCs live in neighbourhoods with 80% population of the respective community, the new paper states
• The paper covered 1.5 million neighbourhoods in cities and villages.

The level of segregation for Muslim and Scheduled Caste residents of Indian cities was as much as the current levels of segregation between Black and White Americans, a new research paper by a group of international academics and economists has found.

The paper, ‘Residential Segregation and Unequal Access to Local Public Services in India: Evidence from 1.5m Neighbourhoods’, used data from the Socioeconomic and Caste Census 2012 and the Economic Census. It found that 26% of the Muslim population lives in neighbourhoods with over 80% Muslim population; and 17% of the SCs live in neighbourhoods with over 80% SC population.

“Levels of urban segregation in India are comparable to Black/White segregation in the United States. Within cities, public facilities and public infrastructure are systematically allocated away from neighbourhoods where many Muslims and Schedules Castes live. Nearly all of the regressive allocation is across neighbourhoods within cities—at the most informal and least studied form of government,” the paper stated.

The paper, which covered 1.5 million neighbourhoods in cities and villages, found that since the government targets extra public services in districts with many SCs, the disadvantages in terms of access to services for SC “have closed or even reversed” if seen at a district-level.

“But within districts, if those services are delivered entirely to high-status neighbourhoods, marginalised groups’ access to services could be very different from what the district analysis suggests,” the paper states.

The authors wrote that neighbourhoods, where marginalised groups reside, have less access to services like primary and secondary schools, healthcare, piped water supply, electricity and covered drains.

“The magnitude of the disparities is large. For example, compared with a 0% Muslim neighbourhood, a 100% Muslim neighbourhood in the same city is 10% less likely to have piped water infrastructure and only half as likely to have a secondary school,” the paper said.

The paper states that residential segregation in urban areas is slightly lower than in rural and the newer cities are less segregated than older ones. Though, it adds, its difficult to say whether this is a change from the past or if cities tend to become more segregated as they grow and become older.

“Compared with SCs, Muslims are relatively more segregated in cities than in rural areas. People living in highly segregated cities are on average poorer than those in less segregated cities; this pattern holds for all social groups, a notable difference from the U.S. context where segregated cities are primarily associated with worse outcomes for Black Americans, but not for other groups,” the paper states.

The paper, which was released by one of its authors, Associate Professor of Economics at Dartmouth Paul Novosad on his website this month, is still a work in progress. Prof. Novosad said the working paper would be published in the future and had been presented at several conferences so far. Apart from him, the authors of the paper are Associate Professor of Economics at Imperial College, London Sam Asher; Kritarth Jha of Development Data Lab; Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago Anjali Adukia; and Brandon Tan, an economist with the International Monetary Fund. /Indianexpress