BENGALURU: A study by the Centre for Public Policy, Indian Institute of Management, Bengaluru, has claimed that caste-based segregation continues to prevail even in cosmopolitan cities like Bengaluru.
The study titled, “Isolated by Caste: Neighbourhood- Scale Residential Segregation in Indian Metros” highlights that caste structures continue to persevere in contemporary urban India, leading to many neighbourhoods with substantial SC-ST population as compared to others.
The researchers go on to state that ‘the bedrock normative promises of urbanisation in India’ that caste boundaries will be diluted with urbanisation, has remained a distant dream as cities ‘remain highly segregated along caste lines’ .
However, Bengaluru scored least on the segregation score as compared to metros such as Kolkata or Mumbai.
The researchers, Naveen Bharathi and Deepak Malghan of IIMB and Andaleeb Rahman of Cornell University, analysed populations in different wards of the city to come up with the “first-ever systematic neighbourhood- scale evidence for urban segregation in India”.
Data was collected from census enumeration blocks (EB) based on 2011 Census - where a block consists of 100-125 households with 650-700 population from five cities which included Bengaluru, Chennai, Delhi, Kolkata and Mumbai.
In Bengaluru, the team went a step further to digitise and geo-register the EB and sub-blocks in 198 wards of Bengaluru. After the data was collected, the team calculated ‘dissimilarity index’ - a demographic measure of how SC and ST populations are distributed in an area - for city and ward levels.
Later, they calculated Gini Index, which is another measure of unequal distribution of population. “Dissimilarity index for various cities, calculated at ward and block levels show that segregation is prevalent in metros across the country,” Naveen Bharathi said.
To a question, he said that wards appeared more homogenous than EBs, as it was possible that only members of one community lived in a particular block. “If we compare the dissimilarity index, Kolkata scores the least in terms of inclusivity while Bengaluru is better off. However, levels of segregation witnessed in all the cities is equally bad,” he added.