Making It in India

SPECIAL ARTICLE
Making It in India Examining Social Mobility in Three Walks of Life

Anirudh Krishna
Inequality is rising in India alongside rapid economic growth, reinforcing the need to investigate social mobility. Are children from less well-off sections also able to rise to higher paying positions, or are these positions going mainly to established elites? This survey of more than 1,500 recent entrants to a variety of engineering colleges, business schools, and higher civil services finds that class and caste continue to make an important difference. Factors that stand out as significant barriers to entry include rural upbringing and parents lack of education. Individuals who have succeeded in surmounting these obstacles have almost invariably been assisted by a teacher, relative, or friend who motivated and inspired them. A way out of the conundrum can be explored by investing in role models and information provision.
The author wishes to thank the director and faculty of Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration, Mussoorie, and the organisation, Aspiring Minds, without whose help this research would not have been possible. I would also like to thank the administration of each of the other participating institutions that must, of necessity, remain unnamed. Thanks are also due to the following individuals who contributed helpfully to the research process or commented on early drafts: Varun Aggarwal, Kripa Ananthpur, Sunil Arora, Moana Bhagabati, Anil Chaplot, Philip Cook, Milton Esman, Barbara Harriss-White, Vegard Iversen, Mary Katzenstein, Sripad Motiram, S Rajagopalan, Aishwarya Ratan, S Sadagopan, Ankur Sarin, Alakh Sharma, M S Sriram, and Kentaro Toyama. The usual disclaimers apply. Anirudh Krishna (ak30@duke.edu) is with Duke University, North Carolina.
s India an open and equitable society where, in the words of Roemer (2000: 21), each individuals expected level of achievement is a function only of his [or her] effort and not of his [or her] circumstances? Is there signicant social mobility, with people from less advantaged backgrounds also aspiring to and achieving higher paying positions? Or do highachievers in India come principally from among its established elites, entrenching privilege and consolidating social layering? These questions have critical contemporary concern. Inequality has risen steadily in the period after economic liberalisation. The ratio between the top and the bottom deciles of the wage distribution [in India] has doubled since the early 1990s (OECD 2011: 57). Wealth inequalities, large to begin with, have also grown larger. The ratio of assets held by the individuals at the 95th percentile to those held by the median individual rose from 758% [in 1991] to 814% in 2001 (Jayadev et al 2011: 88).1 A dualistic mode of employment growth has accompanied and fed into these trends (Mazumdar and Sarkar 2008). Lowearning informal sector positions have grown the most, and while there was almost no net increase in formal employment (with increases in private sector positions being offset by reductions in the public sector), signicant inter-sectoral shifts have resulted in raising the earnings of higher-skilled workers relative to lower-skilled ones.2 Compared to agriculture, which has declined, and organised manufacturing, which has remained static, the services sector rapidly increased its shares of national income and employment, the most shining example of Indian economic success. Between 1993 and 2005, the number of physicians and surgeons in India increased by 53%, the number of lawyers by 45%, and the number of system analysts and programmers increased by a phenomenal 572%.3 The incomes of such service sector professionals rank very high among all occupational groups (Vakulabharanam 2010). A large and widening skills premium separates highereducated workers from less-educated and less-skilled ones (Azam 2012; Cain et al 2010; Kijima 2006). Attaining only primary or middle-school education does not substantially enhance ones earning capacity. Compared to the period before economic liberalisation, there is not much difference in wages of illiterates and up to primary levels of education. Even the middle level of education brought a marginal difference in daily earnings. Wages increased signicantly only after at least secondary level of education (Sarkar and Mehta 2010: 47, emphasis added).
december 7, 2013 vol xlviII no 49
EPW Economic & Political Weekly
38
SPECIAL ARTICLE
Those with college educations have gained the most, attaining nearly 15 times the gain achieved by people with only primary education, whose average real wages have remained static (Chamarbagwala 2006). In contemporary India, more than ever before, acquiring a college education has become key to gaining entry to the most dynamic segments of employment (Mohanty 2006: 3777). Signicant upward mobility in contemporary India is, by and large, contingent upon having or obtaining a college degree.4 It becomes important, therefore, to investigate which individuals from what types of social and educational backgrounds and with what kinds of preparation have been able to secure entry to colleges, especially the more sought-after ones. Which others were able to gain inuential positions in the services sector? Deep and abiding inequalities are associated with a slew of economic and social pathologies.5 However, as the record of land reforms in India shows,6 and as scholarship on emergent policy alignments underlines (Kohli 2012), it may be politically and administratively infeasible to address growing inequality through large-scale redistribution of productive assets. Promoting social mobility may be more practically rewarding.
Investigating Social Mobility
How can capable and hardworking individuals from backgrounds of disadvantage be assisted to gain entry into higherranked colleges and higher-paying occupations? Unfortunately, relatively little is known on this score, and what is known so far can be contradictory and confusing. The study of social mobility is still in its infancy in India and other developing countries. Even in the West, where social mobility has been studied for a longer time, the transmission of economic success across generations remains something of a black box (Bowles, Gintis and Groves 2005: 3). Conventionally, social mobility has been examined by comparing individuals social origins examined in relation to their fathers social class, occupational status, income, or education with these individuals own attainments expressed in similar terms. In general, a robust correlation has been found to exist between parents and childrens socio-economic status. Richer fathers tend to have richer daughters and sons, while poorer children tend to go with poorer parents. Variations across time and space indicate, however, that the pattern of this relationship may be mutable intergenerational mobility varies signicantly across countries; within countries, mobility prospects can change over time.7 Explaining these differences has proved to be contentious and inconclusive so far. Diverse factors have been shown to have varying degrees of inuence. Exposing a persistent myth, it has been found that differences in IQ cannot explain why children from less-privileged social strata systematically perform more poorly than others or why children from privileged families systematically perform better (Esping-Andersen 2005: 149). Education can help raise social mobility prospects, but the effects of education are contingent and contextual. Other sources of inuence, including early childhood nutrition
Economic & Political Weekly EPW
and child-rearing practices, race- and neighbourhood-related factors, school quality, state-supported daycare centres and preschool programmes, health conditions, aspirations, and cultural capital, have also been shown to make a signicant difference within particular contexts.8 Calculations show, however, that all these factors taken together explain no more than one-quarter of the observed intergenerational correlation in earnings in Western contexts (Bowles, Gintis and Groves 2005: 20). Initial examinations of social mobility and equal opportunity in India and other developing countries provide indication that parents and childrens earnings may be even more closely correlated mobility may be lower and opportunity structures more impermeable in developing countries compared to the West.9 Identifying the factors that matter, however, remains even more of a black box than in the West. Few large-sample projects are available for India that compare sons and fathers educations, levels of well-being, or occupations. Because data are not available that track the same individuals over long periods of time, such studies have been limited to making cross-sectional comparisons, examining all fathers and all sons (or daughters), regardless of age or cohort differences. A disparate set of conclusions has resulted from these studies. On the one hand, Jalan and Murgai (2008) nd encouragingly that inter-generational mobility in education has improved signicantly and consistently across generations. Mobility has improved, on average, for all major social groups and wealth classes. Similarly, Azam and Bhatt (2012) nd signicant improvements in educational mobility across generations in India. The popular media in India has especially of late been playing up this impression by highlighting accounts of and by individuals whose rise, especially in the world of business, has been nothing short of meteoric.10 Other studies come to radically different conclusions. For example, Motiram and Singh (2012) nd evidence of substantial intergenerational persistence and considerable inequality of opportunity. Similarly, Kumar et al (2002b: 4096) conclude that there has been no systematic weakening of the links between fathers and sons class positions The dominant picture is one of continuity rather than change. Majumder (2010: 463) uncovers strong intergenerational stickiness in both educational achievement and occupational distribution, especially among scheduled castes (SCs) and scheduled tribes (STs), both historically marginalised groups, noting how occupational mobility is even lower than educational mobility. Hnatkovska, Lahiri and Paul (2013: 468) report results that are more upbeat in this regard, nding a remarkable convergence in the intergenerational mobility rates of SC/STs to non-SC/ST levels in both education attainment and wages. Desai and Kulkarni (2008) uncover some equalisation of educational achievement across caste groups but only at the primary level, with inequalities remaining high at the upper end, especially at the college level, while Gang, Sen and Yun (2012) nd evidence of occupational mobility among SCs, but not among STs.
39
december 7, 2013
vol xlviII no 49
SPECIAL ARTICLE
These competing visions are hard to resolve using conventional methods. Until the required longitudinal data sets have been assembled, which can take a very long time, new and unconventional methods are required to shed more light on the critical questions of opportunity and social mobility in India. In one promising alternative mode of inquiry, investigators have looked directly at particular occupations or within educational institutions that serve as gateways to such occupations. The earliest study of this type was conducted by Rajagopalan and Singh (1968) and it investigated the social backgrounds of students admitted to one elite engineering institute (one of the Indian Institutes of Technology, or IITs). Later, Fuller and Narasimhan (2007) examined the social proles of employees at one software engineering rm in Chennai, while Krishna and Brihmadesam (2006), followed by Upadhya (2007), looked within small groups of such rms in Bangalore. Because these inquiries have focused on only one college or a tiny group of business enterprises, their conclusions, while illuminating, have lacked breadth.
Extending the Scope: Methods and Data
The present examination substantially broadens and takes forward this manner of examining social mobility in India by looking at three separate walks of life engineering, business management, and civil services. In each of these walks of life, referred to as occupational silos, we looked at multiple institutions, ranked in terms of quality and status from high to low. In the silo of engineering colleges, we looked at ve separate colleges corresponding to different quality tiers, and in the second silo, of business schools granting master of business administration (MBA) degrees, we studied eight institutions, once again ranked from high to low. Our sample among the third occupational silo, civil services, is smaller in comparison, consisting of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), an elite cadre, and two lower-status cadres. Taken together, this database, which took more than three years to compile, represents the broadest inquiry of this genre to date. These three career choices were carefully chosen each sits close to the pinnacle of aspiration among youth in India. While the civil services have traditionally been the career of choice among college-educated youth, the other two pathways discussed here have been on the ascendant, arguably eclipsing the IAS as the foremost career preference.11 Especially in the years following economic liberalisation, enrolling in an MBA programme, particularly at an elite school has become for some the equivalent of taking an elevator to the executive suite.12 The number of MBA-granting institutions has grown explosively.13 The report of the National Knowledge Commission, appointed by the prime minister in 2005, notes however that while the number of business schools has trebled in the last 10 yearsmany [are] of indifferent quality. The market has already started discriminating the quality of institutions.14 Business magazines in India publish their pecking orders of business schools annually, strikingly similar across different publications.
40
Similarly, a rapid growth of engineering colleges has followed the rise of the software industry, the largest employer of graduates, offering a large and growing pool of high-paying positions each year. While in the early 1980s there were only about 100 engineering colleges in India, admitting fewer than 25,000 students each year, the number had grown to nearly 1,600 by 2010, collectively admitting over 5,00,000 students each year a 20-fold expansion over 30 years, the fastest in any sector of Indian higher education.15 Once again, there are signicant differences in quality. Simultaneously, competition for entry to the civil services remains erce, assisted in part by salary increases mandated by the central government.16 The ratio of those who make it in to those who apply continues to remain hefty, with no more than one in nearly 500 applicants making it into the IAS.17 As seen below, however, the social character of the IAS intake has changed from earlier times. Corresponding to each of these occupational silos, three sets of original data were assembled between 2009 and 2012. A standardised questionnaire was formulated, pretested, and revised, before being administered among entrants to different engineering colleges and business schools as well as to new recruits to the IAS and two lower-tier civil services. A total of 671 engineering students were surveyed, comprising nearly equal numbers in each of ve engineering colleges located in north, south, east, west, and central India. These colleges correspond to three different quality tiers with one belonging to Tier 1 and two each to Tiers 2 and 3 that were determined in reference to the educational qualications of faculty, the employment prospects of graduates, and students average test scores.18 The same questionnaire was administered to a total of 802 students in eight business schools, also located in diverse regions of India and belonging to three different quality tiers.19 Once again, all students in the entering class were solicited for the survey. Tier 1 broadly represents the top 20 Indian business schools and includes six state-managed Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) that have been in operation for more than ve years. One institution was selected from this tier, which is consistently placed among the top ve business schools in India, and 208 of its students were interviewed (n = 208). Three institutions ranked between 21 and 50 were considered within Tier 2 (n = 333), while another three institutions ranked below 50 were clubbed together in Tier 3 (n = 361). For reasons of condentiality, we do not refer to any of these institutions by name. The names of individuals, extracts from whose interviews are cited below, have also been disguised to make good on our promises of anonymity. Students in all but two of these engineering colleges and business schools were administered the survey instrument online when they appeared for the Aspiring Minds Computer Adaptive Test (AMCAT), a standardised examination that helps students and employers connect with one another.20 Students in the highest-tier business school and engineering college were separately administered an online version of this survey. In the third occupational silo, higher civil services, a paper
SPECIAL ARTICLE
version of same survey instrument was administered at the National Academy of Administration to a recently recruited cohort of the IAS (n = 117). The entering cohort of the state administrative services of one north Indian state (often termed the PCS, or provincial civil service), who tend to occupy positions just below the IAS, was similarly surveyed (n = 38). Finally, a broad grouping of state civil services, ranked just below the PCS, was also surveyed in the same state (n = 63). The response rate was, in general, more than 90% across institutions, except in the highest-tier business school, where it was 68%, and in the middle-tier civil service, where it was just under 70%, all of which were more than the average achieved in surveys of this kind.21 Distinguishing quality tiers within each of these occupational silos was helpful for a variety of reasons. Most usefully, it helped us deal with a basic problem of comparison, not other wise easy to handle individuals who do not get into an engineering or management college or the civil service are hard, even impossible, to identify, especially if we consider, in addition to those who applied but did not get in, all those who did not apply, thinking their chances were slim. The way in which we deal with this problem is best explained by considering the following thought experiment. Imagine that the population of MBA students is stratied according to the pecking order of colleges. People who get into the top-tier business school constitute the top stratum of this population; people who get into the second-tier college, the second stratum; and so on. Otherwise eligible and capable people who do not get into any business school constitute the (hypothetical) lowest stratum. If the analysis is able to identify some factor or factors that regularly decrease (or increase) in value from the highest to the lowest tier, so classied, it stands to reason that these same factors might help distinguish those who do not get into any MBA school, particularly if after examining secondary data it is found that these factors exist at even lower (or higher) levels among the general population. This analysis of difference is complemented below by an analysis of similarity. Factors that have commonly high (or low) values across tiers, but which are, on average, much lower (or higher) among the general population also bear paying attention to because they help identify threshold effects, minimum levels associated with successful entry to higher paying occupations. To the extent that common trends are discerned across separate occupational silos, a more general statement can be ventured about correlates of social mobility in India.
Results
less-educated parents, however, relative poverty has a more severely disabling effect. The representation of SCs and STs within the student bodies of engineering colleges and business school is greater at the current time compared to historical trends, but these numbers remain considerably lower than the population proportions of these groups. Women have made the most signicant gains among all groups examined here, raising their presence in all three occupational silos far above the proportions that existed even two decades ago. Even so, they are not yet 50% of the intake. The majority of those who gained entry have relatively well-educated parents, with most fathers having a college education and the majority of mothers having at least highschool education, a characteristic that is rare among Indians at large. A vast majority of fathers belong to the salaried class, service professionals in the private or public sectors or selfemployed with their own businesses. A combination of disadvantages being rural and poor, or SC/ST and rural, or the child of less-educated parents and female constitutes a more severe handicap. Only a handful of such multiply disadvantaged people have managed to gain entry, even to the lowest-tier institutions. In general, the conclusion cannot be avoided that an urban professional elite is being reproduced, with the sons and (increasingly) the daughters of salaried and self-employed professionals themselves joining higher education and higherstatus occupations in the largest numbers. There are, however, a small number of notable exceptions. Detailed follow-up interviews with these outliers, or people who bucked the trend and despite facing long odds made it into one of these places, show how, to a considerable extent, socio-economic disadvantages tend to operate via the medium of what Heckman (2011) has collectively termed soft skills information, motivation, aspirations, social networks, and cultural capital.22
Rural Origin: Degrees of Rural
Some such commonly signicant results can be foreshadowed at the outset. People who were brought up and educated in rural areas are at a disadvantage. The longer the time spent at rural schools, the greater tends to be this disadvantage. Higher economic status confers an advantage in terms of gaining entry, but by itself does not get one a place in the highestranked institutions. In combination with rural residence or
We begin by looking at the experiences of rural residents. A point of clarication is in order here. Classifying individuals as urban or rural is not a straightforward task. How does one classify someone who was born in a village but at the earliest opportunity left to pursue education in an elite boarding school? Or someone who spent one or two years at a rural school, but for the rest of her time was educated in a city? Or someone who lived in a rural area while commuting to a city school? Rural and urban are not neatly divisible categories of individuals. There is a whole range of rural-ness, distinguished by degrees. To assess where some particular individual should be placed on this spectrum, we looked at three separate characteristics, associated with different degrees of rural-ness. We began by examining the nature of schools rural or urban that an individual attended at four separate stages of his or her education (primary, middle, high school, and higher secondary or pre-university). Next, we looked at their place of residence while growing up (rural village, tahsil/taluka
41
december 7, 2013
vol xlviII no 49
SPECIAL ARTICLE
headquarters, district capital, state capital, and metro city).23 Finally, we looked at the occupations and the current place of residence of their parents. Combining these separate criteria helped generate conuences of characteristics associated with higher and lower degrees of rural-ness. Someone who attended a rural school for even one year is regarded as minimally rural for the purpose of this classication (R 1).24 Another person who attended rural schools throughout, from the primary to the higher secondary level, is considered rural to a higher degree (R 2). Those who attended rural schools all through and whose parents live in rural areas constitute the next higher degree (R 3). The most rural individuals in terms of this classication are those who attended rural schools throughout and whose parents live in rural areas and work in agriculture as farmers or agricultural labour (R 4). The image that comes to mind when one thinks of a person in India as being rural commonly conforms to this maximal denition. Table 1 presents the related results.
Table 1: Degrees of Rural (Percentage of interviewees in each quality tier)
Business Schools Tier 1 Tier 2 Tier 3 Engineering Colleges Tier 1 Tier 2 Tier 3 Tier 1 Civil Services Tier 2 Tier 3
R1 R2 R3 R4
6 1 1 0
8 3 3 1
14 11 8 3
15 6 5 2
16 10 7 1
24 11 8 2
33 12 10 7
48 14 11 4
56 32 23 12
The rst general trend to report is that rural India is considerably under-represented. Regardless of which denition of rural is considered, the proportion of rural people in any tier of any of these three walks of life is much lower than the proportion of rural residents in India (which was 69% in 2011, falling slightly from 72% in 2001). Even if we consider minimally rural people (R 1), this proportion is only 6% in the Tier 1 business school, rising to 24% in the Tier 3 engineering college, and to 56% in the Tier 3 civil service. As progressively higher degrees of rural are considered, the proportion of entrants consistently falls. Across occupations and quality tiers, the more rural one is, the harder it is to gain entry. Not one R 4 individual found a place in the top-tier business school and the corresponding proportions in other business schools and in engineering colleges is nowhere more than 3%. Among civil services, the proportions of rural individuals are higher in comparison, illustrating what is perhaps an emergent trend rural India is relatively poorly represented in the rising occupations, engineering and business management, and it is better represented in the civil services. This trend represents a change from the past. Potter (1996: 231), reporting on the nature of individuals recruited to the IAS in the 1980s, found them to be largely urban educated, products of the better schools and colleges, and raised in cities. It seems likely, therefore, that as urban elites have gravitated away from civil services, others, including some educated in rural schools, have come in to take these places.25 Why do rural origins impose handicaps to social mobility? Even when they have been successful in gaining entry, why have rural individuals more often made it to lower-tier compared to higher-tier institutions?
42
Our outlier interviews helped shed light on these questions. Shivana Prasad, who gained admission at a Tier 2 engineering college, despite being up against cumulative odds being maximally rural (R 4) and female provided the following explanation.26 Lack of good primary and higher education is a key factor. Just being highly intelligent does not sufce. Ones mind has to be trained and skills have to be sharpened for one to get admission in a good place. Poor schooling is a major constraint. Once a person has been well educated, he might still not nd a good college because good opportunities to excel are not made available to him. The contacts and connections that the students parents and relatives have are also limited. Lack of inspiration due to absence of role models is related. Students may feel that the aim is unclear and unachievable. In my case, my cousin, who had studied in nearby city, guided me. He was appearing for PSC (the qualifying examination for employment in the state civil service). He had done a course in a polytechnic. He helped me with my school work and gave me books to read. He guided me about engineering colleges and how to study for them. Other outliers similarly emphasised how poor quality education combined with a lack of information resources (including role models, guides, and mentors providing career advice) hold back many capable and hardworking individuals. Those few rural individuals who have nevertheless secured entry to gateway academic institutions and the civil services have almost invariably beneted from the intervention of some helpful individual a cousin, uncle, teacher, or family friend who motivated them and provided guidance.
Education in English
Another aspect of a less-promising education in rural areas has to do with training in the English language. In her perceptive analysis of the new middle class in India, which includes, of course, the three occupational silos considered here, Fernandes (2006: 69) notes how uency in English marks an individual with the distinction of class culture such linguistic skills are a necessary component for access. Examining national data, Azam et al (2013) uncover a substantial wage-premium for English speakers across all occupations. Among our sample, the critical importance of English showed up starkly. For instance, 88% of Tier 1 business school students studied in high schools where English was the medium of instruction (or rst language used). As many as 71% of Tier 1 students attended English-medium schools from the outset, starting from the primary level. The corresponding proportions for Tiers 2 and 3 are 82% and 59%. In engineering colleges, these percentages are somewhat higher, while in the civil services they are somewhat lower, but not radically so, particularly within the IAS. Those who make it to top-tier schools and civil services are in this sense not representative of the Indian population. Only 13% of Indias schools at the primary and upperprimary stage have English as the medium of instruction and
SPECIAL ARTICLE
a further 18% teach English as the rst or second language (NCERT 2005). Few village schools are able to eld teachers who are competent to teach in English. Results of standardised tests conducted among 11-14-year old schoolchildren as part of the India Human Development Survey of 2004-05 show that all types of learning outcomes are at considerably lower levels in rural compared to urban schools, falling regularly with increasing distances to towns. English language prociency is more than seven times higher among urban compared to rural schoolchildren 16.2% of urban but only 2.4% of rural children who were tested could read or write even a word of English.
Rural-Urban Migration
he or she was studying in high school. Basic and relatively low-value assets, possessed on occasion even by less well-off households, form part of this asset list, including bicycles, radios, and pressure cookers. Higher-value and less frequently possessed assets, including stocks and bonds, washing machines, and cars, are also included. We constructed a simple asset index constructed by adding the total number of assets possessed by each household.28 Table 2 presents these results.
Table 2: Relative Wealth (Percentage of interviewees in each quality tier)
Business Schools Engineering Colleges Civil Services Tier 1 Tier 2 Tier 3 Tier 1 Tier 2 Tier 3 Tier 1 Tier 2 Tier 3
To overcome these and other disadvantages of a rural education, many families have migrated from villages to cities. Geographic mobility has served in a large number of cases as a means of social mobility for those who could afford to make the move. We asked respondents about whether their families had ever moved residence and whether this move was motivated primarily by the desire to improve the academic prospects of you and your siblings. On average, as many as 29% of business school students reported moving for academic reasons. Across occupational silos and quality tiers, a higher proportion of interviewees began primary school in a rural setting, but by the time they had reached high school the percentage still in a rural setting had steadily fallen. For instance, among students of one Tier 2 engineering college, 11.1% attended rural schools at the primary level, but only 7.1% attended rural middle schools, and fewer still, 3.8%, studied in rural high schools. Among entrants to the IAS, 43% attended rural schools at the primary level, but only 26% remained in rural areas through high school. It is not only rural government schools where these percentages fell as students advanced. The percentages attending rural private schools also fell as students moved from the primary through the higher secondary level. Among IAS entrants, 17% attended rural private schools at the primary level, but only 9% remained in such schools for higher secondary. Among entrants to engineering colleges, this drop was sharper from 19% to 1.6%. The ability to send ones children to private, English medium, and city-based schools is dependent upon a familys economic situation. We next look at how relative wealth has made a difference to an individuals chances.
Relative Wealth
Average number of assets 9.2 10.1 8.6 Relative deprivation: few assets P1 (<4 assets) 6 10 16 P2 (<2 assets) 2 8 12 Few assets and government school P3 (P1*all govt school) 1 3 4 P4 (P2*all govt school 0 2 1 Few assets and rural background P5 (P2*R2) 0 0 1 P6 (P2*R4) 0 0 1
8.5 10.5 8.4 12 2 0 0 0 0 7 3 2 1 0 0 10 4 2 2 1 0
6.2 5.2 4.1 37 42 15 16 13 8 3 0 8 2 0 0 48 25 16 5 4 2
To examine different levels of household well-being, we asked respondents about the ownership by their household of origin (that is, their parents household) of 16 types of assets, including movable assets (such as TVs, motorcycles, refrigerators), immovable assets (homes, commercial properties, agricultural land), and nancial assets (stocks, xed deposit accounts).27 The survey questions asked simply about the presence or absence of each asset type in the parental household at the time when the respondent was growing up, specically when
The rst data row shows the average number of assets possessed by the families of entrants to these institutions. Notice that the average number of assets owned by entrants is higher among business school and engineering students and lower among civil service entrants. Notice also that household wealth and level of entry are not monotonically related those getting into higher-tier institutions are not, on average, from wealthier backgrounds compared to their peers in lower tier institutions. In general, the individuals who have gained entry to any of these institutions come from households that are better off compared to the average Indian household. For example, more than 81% of business school respondents grew up in households that owned a refrigerator 75% in Tier 3 schools, 94% in Tier 2 schools, and 86% in the Tier 1 institution. The corresponding shares in Tiers 2 and 3 engineering colleges are, respectively, 80% and 61%. The lowest share of refrigeratorowning households, 34%, is found in the Tier 3 civil service. But all these numbers are still higher than those prevailing among the general population. In 2001-02 (at the time when most of our respondents would have been in or close to high school) only 13.4% of all households in India possessed a refrigerator (NCAER 2005). Not everyone who made it into these institutions was from a relatively rich family. To examine how many relatively poor individuals also got into these places and whether these numbers differ substantially between lower- and higher-tier institutions, we assessed degrees of deprivation by examining different criteria, including asset ownership and attendance at government schools. We began identifying economically deprived individuals by short-listing those whose parental households possessed four or fewer assets (P1).29 Separately, we considered parental households that possessed two or fewer assets (P2). The second and third data rows of Table 2 provide these gures.
43
december 7, 2013
vol xlviII no 49
SPECIAL ARTICLE
The share of individuals with less than four assets is not insignicant in any of the institutions considered here. In the top-tier business school, such individuals constituted 6% of the intake, rising to 16% in the Tier 3 business school, and further to 37% in the IAS and to 48%, nearly half, in the Tier 3 civil service. Poorer individuals, like rural ones, have a higher probability of getting into the civil services, especially lower-tier ones, and their chances of getting into business schools and engineering colleges are lower. Turning to a stricter denition of relative deprivation (two or fewer assets), we nd these numbers falling sharply. Only 2% in the top-tier business school and no more than 25% in any institution (the Tier 3 civil service) grew up in households whose only assets were a bicycle or radio or TV or pressure cooker. Again, to put these numbers in perspective, nearly half of all Indians lived in a household that did not own a TV in 2005 and 45% did not possess a bicycle, according to data provided by the India Human Development Survey. Yet another criterion for examining relative poverty relates to attendance at government (rather than private) schools. At the primary level, government schools usually charge no fees, and at higher levels, fees in government schools are nominal, being substantially lower than those charged by private schools. Children of relatively deprived families are thus much likelier to attend government schools, although there is no one-to-one correspondence. We looked at two combinations of relative deprivation and government school attendance. First, identifying individuals whose families possessed four or fewer assets and who attended only government schools (P3), and next, looking at individuals whose families possessed two or fewer assets and who also attended only government schools (P4). These numbers are much smaller than those reported above, both falling to zero in the top-tier business school and engineering college. Within the Tier 3 civil services, as well, the representation of poorer people, so dened, is quite small, being 16% for P3 and only 5% for P4. People from relatively poor households who can only afford to attend government schools are thus unlikely to achieve signicant upward mobility. If one is poor and rural, suffering two disadvantages simultaneously, then ones chances of getting into any of these institutions is truly dismal. The last two rows of Table 2 provide data for two different combinations of rural upbringing and relative deprivation. P5 refers to two or fewer assets and education throughout in rural schools (government or private), while P6, the stricter criterion, refers to the combination of two or fewer assets and the strictest denition of rural considered here, R 4. Considering either combination, the numbers are zero in most cases, and no greater than 4% in any case (that of the Tier 3 civil services). Even as relatively large numbers of rural individuals have been getting into this lower tier of civil services, the share of rural and poor individuals is closer to zero. The impression gained here of an urban and relatively well-off elite reproducing itself with some notable exceptions, of course gets
44
reinforced when data are examined related to parents occupations and education levels.
Parents Occupations and Education
Parents occupations and education levels, because of intergenerational stickiness, have been shown repeatedly by social mobility analyses to have a critical impact on childrens prospects (Motiram and Singh 2012; Heckman 2011). In the Indian context, Kumar et al (2002 a and b) have highlighted the critical role of what they term the salariat, comprising salaried employees in government or private-sector ofces and selfemployed professionals and businesspeople. Table 3 presents these data, showing how salariat fathers constitute as many as 94% of the total within Tier 1 business schools and engineering colleges, falling in Tier 3 civil services, but still only to 71%. The large numbers of salariat fathers, coupled with the near-monotonic decline of this percentage across quality tiers, provides indication of intergenerational reproduction of occupational class.30
Table 3: Parents Occupations (Percentage of interviewees in each quality tier)
Fathers* Own business or self-employed Private sector service Government service (including military) Salariat** Agriculture Mothers Own business or self-employed Private sector service Government service Salariat** Agriculture Homemaker
13 17
34 12
37 11 34 82 17 6 5 12 23 3 73
19 18 57 94 3 4 12 13 29 1 69
32 14 38 84 9 5 6 11 22 2 73
23 15 49 87 9 3 3 10 16 1 82
11 11 3 11 63 57 77 79 15 15 2 0 2 2 16 6 20 8 8 6 70 84
10 8 53 71 26 0 0 3 3 8 87
64 40 94 86 3 9 2 7 24 33 0 65 9 5 13 27 2 70
* Column totals do not add to 100 for fathers or mothers because of some other and unreported occupations; ** equals the sum of the preceding three categories.
Note the high share of government employees among fathers, ranging from 64% in the Tier 1 business school to 34% among Tier 3 business schools. In general, the highest share of government-employee fathers is found among those who are themselves government employees. More than half of all entry-level civil servants across the three tiers have fathers who are (or were) also in government service, and relatively few have fathers employed in the private sector or with their own businesses. The children of private-sector fathers are more likely to be in business schools or in engineering colleges. Across these three occupational silos, the share of agriculturist fathers (and mothers) is very low. According to data on occupational classications collected in 2004-05 by the National Sample Survey Ofce, more than 55% of Indias working population is categorised as cultivator or agricultural labour. Yet, only 3% of Tier 1 business-school fathers are so classied, with this share rising in lower-tier business schools and engineering colleges and among all tiers of civil services,
SPECIAL ARTICLE
but still nowhere more than 26%, less than half the population share of agriculturists. Similarly, among mothers, the share of agriculturists is very low. The rural-urban divide is critically important, as we saw before. Another noteworthy feature is the high share of homemaker mothers, which rises monotonically within each occupational silo from higher- to lower-tier institutions. For instance, among engineering colleges, the share of homemaker mothers rises from 69% in Tier 1 to 82% in Tier 3. Similarly, in the civil services category, this share rises from 70% in Tier 1 to as high as 87% in Tier 3. Such mothers, likely to be less educated than others, are also less likely to serve as providers to their children of soft skills, including career-relevant information. Not surprising, given these results, the share of collegeeducated fathers and mothers is higher among Tiers 1 and 2 and lower in Tier 3 institutions across occupational silos. Table 4 reports these numbers.
Table 4: Parents Education (Percentage of interviewees in each quality tier)
(the Sachar Committee) which examined the social, economic, and educational status of the Muslim community found that the disparity in graduation rates between Muslims and others, already large, had further widened after 1970.31 In addition, the gender divide remains large. In 2004, more than twice as many men as women in India (3.4% compared to 1.4%) had postgraduate or professional degrees. Does the current intake represent any improvement on these inherited trends? Table 5 presents the caste, religious, and gender composition of the individuals whom we interviewed, also showing gures related to some combinations of characteristics. While the share of Hindus is, on average, close to the population proportion of this religious group, the share of Muslims is overall less than half their population proportion, underlining the conclusions of the Sachar Committee.
Table 5: Religion, Caste, and Gender (Percentage of interviewees in each quality tier)
Religion Census Business Schools Engineering Colleges Civil Services 2011 Tier 1 Tier 2 Tier 3 Tier 1 Tier 2 Tier 3 Tier 1 Tier 2 Tier 3
Father < college Mother < college Mother < high school Father < college and mother < high school
9 25 5 1
18 35 8 4
34 53 15 11
11 36 10 5
34 46 11 8
40 71 19 13
22 40 49 49 70 82 27 56 68 15 33 47
A majority of business school students come from highly educated households. Nearly 74% of their fathers and more than 58% of their mothers have college degrees. Among engineering college students as well, the corresponding proportions are high 71% and 48%. Among the civil services, these proportions are, respectively, 67% and 41%, once again lower than among the corresponding proportions in the other two occupational silos, but still higher than those prevailing amid the population at large. Only 6.8% of all households in India had an adult woman with a college degree and only 13.2% had a male college degree-holder, according to the India Human Development Survey of 2004-05. Importantly, parents education levels serve not only as a measure of socio-economic status, but are related as well to other inuences on an individuals prospects for social mobility. In India, where institutions providing career guidance and relevant information are virtually non-existent, parents also serve as a critical source of diverse soft skills. We return to this point after considering one other set of socio-economic characteristics.
Religion, Caste and Gender
Hindu 81 72 Muslim 13.5 2 Caste group SC 16 9 ST 8 6 Caste and residence SC*R1 0 ST*R1 0 Gender Female 48.5 17 Gender and relative deprivation Female*P1 0
76 7 3 0 0 0 34 1
70 8 5 1 1 0 43 2
89 2 8 4 0 0 37 3
88 0 5 1 1 0 21 0
93 4 6 1 2 0 36 2
81 92 7 2 13 17 11 7 1 3 0 3
87 4 12 6 4 2 37 6
21 14 3 0
Caste is important to consider in the Indian context. On average, among all Indians, old and young, no more than 1.4% of all SCs and 0.9% of all STs have postgraduate or professional degrees, compared to 5.6% of upper-caste Hindus (Deshpande and Yadav 2006). Religion is similarly important. Deshpandes (2006: 2439) analysis of nationally representative data shows how Muslims, who comprise nearly 14% of the population, constitute only 5.0% of engineering students and only 5.7% of students in other college programmes. A high-level committee
The proportion of SCs and STs in business schools and engineering colleges is much lower than the proportion that these groups make up in the national population, while in the three civil service tiers it is closer to it. The reservations policy has a great deal to do with this comparative achievement. Even among the business schools and engineering colleges that we examined, the share of SCs and STs was higher in state-run institutions compared to privately managed ones. The toptier business school and the top-tier engineering college, both state-run, thus have higher proportions of SCs and STs compared to their lower-tier counterparts, nearly all of which are in private hands. The silver lining in these otherwise uninspiring results is that even these low rates of representation are higher than historical trends. The current proportions represent a distinct improvement, for example, on the results reported for the late 1960s by Rajagopal and Singh (1968), who found not a single SC or ST in the elite engineering college that they surveyed. Similar results, giving cause for some optimism in this regard, are presented by Deshpande and Palshikar (2008) and by Hnatkovska, Lahiri and Paul (2013). Unfortunately, rural SCs and STs have been almost entirely unable to make it into business schools and engineering colleges, and their share in the civil services is also low. The combination SC (or ST) and P1 (fewer than four assets) similarly yielded tiny numbers throughout. Not one poor ST made it to any engineering college or business school.
45
december 7, 2013
vol xlviII no 49
SPECIAL ARTICLE
The greatest improvement on historical trends has been made by women. In the 1960s, there were almost no women in elite engineering or management institutions. Partly as a consequence, women today comprise only 2% of the total managerial strength in the Indian corporate sector.32 Similarly, in 1975, women constituted an innitesimally small proportion (0.68%) of engineering graduates, rising over the years, but still only 8.74% in 1988 (Sukhatme and Parikh 2004). The higher civil services have also traditionally been a male preserve. Among all IAS ofcials serving at the beginning of 1985, more than 92% were men.33 The substantial increase observed over these historical trends is, therefore, heartening. As many as 17% of the recent intake into the Tier 1 business school, 37% in the Tier 1 engineering college, and 21% of recent recruits to the IAS are women,34 with an even greater representation in Tier 3 institutions. Once again, multiple liabilities woman and rural, woman and SC/ST, woman and poor raise the barrier cumulatively, making it virtually impossible for individuals to move ahead. The last row of Table 5 reports one such calculation for illustrative purposes. Being female and poor (P1) drastically reduces an individuals chances of making it. In general, women who have been making it are largely urban-educated daughters of professional fathers and well-educated mothers.
Conclusions: What Should Be Done?
suffer not only because of the low quality of education that they receive; they suffer additionally from shortage of inspiration and dearth of role models. Few schoolgoers in rural areas even aspire to be engineers or MBAs. Prior surveys have revealed how the vast majority does not even know such possibilities exist (Krishna 2010). Those who do somehow gain the knowledge of these possibilities remain unsure of how to proceed. Parents education level was revealed in the foregoing analysis as a critical issue, with higher levels, particularly of mothers education, going together with entry to a higher ranked institution. Parents in rural areas mostly have little or no formal education, in large part, because when they were of schoolgoing age rural schools simply did not exist in sufcient numbers. Such parents are unable in most part to monitor what (if anything) their children are learning at school. Further, they are unable to garner or impart useful information and career advice. Suraj Kumar, another outlier whom we interviewed in detail, explained how these limitations operate in practice.
Families where the parents are less educated lack the environment necessary to prepare for competitive exams, and people are also not aware of the opportunities that exist outside. Such a family may not have enough faith that so many years of additional education, beyond schooling, would result in some additional benet or improvement in quality of life. Such students also suffer a lack of pre-established network of friends or relatives and lack of proper information regarding the methods and means of becoming successful. For many years I did not know what to do in future. No one in my circle dreamed big. I also faced a lack of other means of information like libraries, good television channels like Discovery, Internet, etc. Such students need teachers capable of nurturing talent. I was lucky that my teacher in 8th class motivated me constantly. Even after I went higher [in school] he guided me. Without his help, I would not have made it.
Success, Gladwell (2008: 175-76) notes, arises out the steady accumulation of advantages: when and where you are born, what your parents did for a living, and what the circumstances of your upbringing were, all make a signicant difference in how well you do in the world. In the Indian context examined above, at least four socio-economic factors act as signicant handicaps to substantial upward mobility rural upbringing, parents employed in agriculture or as homemakers, relative poverty, and parents (especially mothers) lack of high school and college education. Being of SC/ST origin and being a woman are other disabling factors, but improvements over historical trends, especially in the case of women, provide some glimmers of hope in an otherwise bleak situation, where, by and large, an urban middle class of service sector professionals is being intergenerationally reproduced. Why should each of these factors matter and why should their combinations be potentially lethal to prospects for upward mobility? What can be done meaningfully to improve the prospects of people facing one or more of these handicaps, which is a large share of the Indian population? The answers are not entirely clear; scholarship in this area is relatively recent. One clue worth exploring further was anticipated in our earlier examination of rural origins. In situations such as those prevailing in India, where information about career pathways is mostly obtained by word of mouth, lack of achievement in the past limits the potential for current generations, generating a vicious cycle that is hard to overcome without external assistance. Since hardly anyone in their immediate environment has become an engineer or MBA or IAS in the past, young people in situations of economic and social disadvantage
46
Inequality of opportunity is sustained in contexts where access to diverse role models is limited. Young people in these circumstances tend to develop a more brittle horizon of aspirationsand a thinner, weaker sense of career pathways; while others, who live in cities and whose parents are educated and professionally employed, come to have a more complex experience of the relationship between a wide range of ends and meansa bigger stock of available experiences (Appadurai 2004: 68-70). A study carried out among high-achieving students from backgrounds of relative poverty in the US showed how even a limited amount of careful guidance and information provision can make an important difference. Low-income students in the treatment group who received easy-to-understand packets of information about the college application process and about college costs were much more likely to apply for and be accepted to selective colleges. Once they had entered into these elite colleges, the low-income students performed as well as their better-off peers, showing how a potential exists which needs to be activated.35 That lack of role models and poor information probably plays an even larger role in India was underlined by different parts of our survey. Such a situation cannot be allowed to continue; the happenstance of having a well-informed friend or well-connected
SPECIAL ARTICLE
relative does not compensate for lack of institutional provision. Indias rst prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, writing in 1961, stated, I have no doubt that there is a vast reservoir of talent in this country. If only we can give it opportunity!36 Opportunity, however, is still not widely dispersed in India, resulting in a far-from-optimal utilisation of the talent pool about which Nehru wrote. Institutions are required, especially in rural areas and urban slums, that can help endow individuals with soft skills providing career information, guidance, and motivation, and building role models for the future. More equal societies have invested in building public institutions responsible for providing career-related information,37 including career counselling agencies, employment exchanges, textbooks detailing diverse career paths, interactive websites, radio and TV links, and so on. Such interventions will not entirely resolve the problem. Many other factors, including poor quality health and education, need to be addressed in parallel. However, in the absence
Notes
1 Other recent examinations concur. See, for example, Azam (2012); Bardhan (2010); Cain et al (2010); Chaudhuri and Ravallion (2007); Himanshu (2007); Kijima (2006); Motiram and Vakulabharanam (2012); Sarkar and Mehta (2010); and Topalova (2008). 2 See, for example, Joshi (2010); Kannan and Raveendran (2009); Kochar et al (2006); Kotwal, Ramaswami and Wadhwa (2011); NCEUS (2007); Sanyal and Bhattacharyya (2007); and Unni and Raveendran (2007). 3 Author calculations from employment data provided by National Sample Survey Ofce (NSSO) surveys of 1993-94 and 2004-05. 4 Although getting a college degree does not guarantee high-paid employment (Jeffrey et al 2004), not getting a college degree almost certainly ensures against it. 5 See Berg and Ostry (2011); Weisskopf (2011); and Wilkinson and Pickett (2009). 6 See, for example, Appu (1996) and Bandyopadhyay (1986). 7 See, for instance, Bowles and Gintis (2002); Corak (2004); Erickson and Goldthorpe (1992, 2002); Hout (2006); Hout and DiPrete (2006); Jantti et al (2005); Morgan (2006); OECD (2010); Roemer (2000); Solon (2002); and Smeeding (2005). 8 See, for example, Behrman, Birdsall and Szekely (2001); Bourdieu (1986); Breen (2010); Currie (2001); Danziger and Waldvogel (2005); DiMaggio (1982); Erickson and Goldthorpe (2002); Hannum and Buchmann (2005); Mayer (1997); Paxson and Schady (2005); Scott and Litcheld (1994); Torche (2010); and Trzcinski and Randolph (1991). 9 See, for example, Behrman, Birdsall and Szekely (2001); Birdsall and Graham (2000); Castaneda and Aldaz-Carroll (1999); Graham (2000); Grawe (2004); Moser (2009); Perlman (2011); and Quisumbing (2006). In the case of India, Bardhan (2010: 132) asserts that it may well be on the way to becoming one of the worst countries in the worldin terms of inequality of opportunity and intergenerational mobility. 10 One such story that attracted a great deal of public attention was reported with the provocative title Your Birthplace, Background Dont Determine Your Success. Available at http:// www.rediff.com/getahead/slide-show/slideshow-1-achievers-vikas-khemani-your-birthEconomic & Political Weekly EPW
of such institutional links, talented individuals will continue to face considerable obstacles to achievement. Helping even one or two talented and hardworking individuals from poor rural and urban slum communities make it to places of high standing will act as a crucial stimulus, raising the aspirations of, and showing the way ahead to, many others like them. Communities who gain the condence that their sons and daughters have a real chance of becoming engineers and MBAs and senior government ofcials will shed the defeatism, the lack of hope, that presently besets so many of them. Communities and individuals motivated in this manner will no longer hopelessly accept absentee teachers and low-quality teaching their childrens futures are critically at stake. Supply-led quality improvements in education and health have proved to be of limited potential. An alternative paradigm of development led from below by communities energised by new and real faith in the social mobility prospects of their sons and daughters is waiting to be explored.
and IIITs, which constitute Tier 1 for the present examination), it did examine differences between the next 100 engineering colleges (our Tier 2) and the rest (our Tier 3), nding, for example, that 31% of Tier 2 students would be able to nd employment in the information technology (IT) services sector, compared to only 16% of students in Tier 3. Almost the entire faculty of our Tier 1 business school has a PhD from eminent national and international institutions. Starting salaries for the class graduating in 2010 averaged Rs 9,65,000 annually. Two institutions in our sample are Tier 2. About half of all faculty members have PhDs. Average starting salaries for the class graduating in 2011 were Rs 5,50,000. Another eight institutions belong to Tier 3. Only a handful of faculty has PhDs. Average starting salaries are close to Rs 3,00,000. A fuller description of this test, as well as details about the innovative company, Aspiring Minds, that designed and administered this test are available at www.aspiringminds.in The average response rate for online surveys is around 34%, according to Cook et al (2000). Clearly, some among these factors, such as urban residence and salariat parents, or urban schools and English-medium education, may be related to each other, pointing towards the importance of clusters rather than individual characteristics, a point to be borne in mind as we examine the results. Multiple regression can help tease out the relative (and joint) signicance of different factors, but the scope for such analysis is limited because a large missing part of the data relate to the characteristics of those do not get into any of these occupational silos. In these circumstances, we can only compare across individuals in higher and lower tiers, de-emphasising comparison with the general population, a critical piece. Undertaking such analysis, however, and comparing across tiers in the management schools silo (and separately across tiers among engineering colleges) using multinomial logistic regression analyses, helped uphold the results reported below, particularly highlighting the separate signicance of soft skills. At the time of writing, India was divided into 604 administrative districts. Districts, particularly rural ones, are further divided into tahsils or talukas, the headquarters of which are often large villages and sometimes small towns.
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
place-background-don-t-determine-your-success/ 20120626.htm A contentious debate on this point has been waged in the popular press. The following news reports are illustrativehttp://www.dailymail. co.uk/indiahome/indianews/article-2159428/ Babus-ight-IAS-ofcers-make-beeline-greenerpastures-pvt-sector.html; http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2007-07-01/news/ 28415967_1_civil-services-top-career-nancialfacilities; and http://www.theweekendleader. com/Dreams/1025/Mules-and-horses.html L, Bolshaw (2011): Push to Help Women Find the Keys to the C-suite, Financial Times, 21 November. Starting from a tiny base in the early 1950s, business schools in India increased slowly in number over the next 30 years. Since the mid1990s, more than 100 new business schools have been established annually, and more than 1,00,000 students start MBA programmes every year. Report of the Working Group on Management Education of the National Knowledge Commission. Available at http://www.knowledgecommission.gov.in/downloads/documents/wg_ managedu.pdf For these and other trends related to engineering education in India, see the 2007 report by Rangan Banerjee and Vinayak P Muley, Engineering Education in India, available at http:// www.ese.iitb.ac.in/EnEdu.pdf As Azam (2012: 1145) notes, The public sector workers at the top end not only enjoy a positive premium but this premium has increased between 1993 and 2004. See http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes. com/2009-03-25/news/28435314_1_civil-services-private-sector-aspirants A large majority of faculty teaching at the Tier 1 institution (widely regarded as one of the best in India) has a PhD degree, most from highly ranked institutes in India and abroad, compared to fewer than 50% of Tier 2 and less than 25% of Tier 3 faculty. Students employment prospects also vary considerably across these three tiers. A national employability report, based on a sample of 55,000 students from more than 250 engineering colleges across India, found vast differences in employability across colleges of different quality tiers (see www.aspiringminds.in). While this report did not look at the very best colleges (such as IITs
19
20
21 22
23
december 7, 2013
vol xlviII no 49
47
SPECIAL ARTICLE
24 A school was classied as rural for this analysis if it was located in a village or at a taluka/tahsil headquarters. Schools located at district and state capitals and metro cities (along with the tiny number reported to be outside India) were classied as urban. Including all schools located at tahsil/taluka headquarters in the category of rural schools (in addition to all those located in rural villages) tends to overestimate the representation of rural students. 25 Increased investments in school education by richer farmer families, acquiring a new sense of urgency in recent years, have also helped promote this emergent trend (Jeffrey 2010: 70). Corresponding to the results reported here, Fernandes (2006: 106) notes how elds such as business and information technology [have] replaced civil service employment as the social marker of the upper-tier [urban] middle class. 26 This name, like other interviewees names, has been made up for the sake of condentiality. 27 Incomes are particularly hard to recall accurately, especially in rural contexts where seasonality can result in considerable uctuations. Following Carter and Barrett (2006), we preferred to examine households usual (or structural) material conditions using asset ownership as the measure of household wealth. 28 We also used principal component analysis to create other asset-based indices, weighted in different ways. However, the correlation of these indices with the simple count of the total number was > 0.95 in each case, reinforcing our preference for using the simpler and more intuitive measure. 29 Bicycles, radios, TVs, and pressure cookers were the most common asset types. 30 Further, and to some extent contrary to what Bertrand et al (2010) found earlier in relation to engineering students, occupational class seems to matter within caste categories as well nearly all SC and ST students in our sample have salariat fathers. 31 See http://minorityaffairs.gov.in/sachar. 32 Why are There So Few Women Managers in India? 26 October 2006, at http://www.rediff. com/money/2006/oct/06guest.htm 33 See the report titled Social Background of Ofcers in the Indian Administrative Service, by Santosh Goyal, available at http://isidev. nic.in/pdf/santosh1.pdf 34 The top two positions among all candidates to a recent recruitment into the IAS went to women. See the news report at http://articles.timesondia.indiatimes.com/2011-05-12/india/ 29535593_1_women-candidates-merit-list-preliminary-exam 35 See Hoxby and Turner (2013). 36 Nehru, Letter to Chief Ministers, 27 June 1961, cited in Shourie (2006: x). 37 For instance, employment ofces, privately operated or government-run, function in every large and small town in Sweden. Additional guidance and vocational training opportunities are provided at high schools and through trade unions and the mass media. Bonn, Germany, Available at http://ftp.iza. org/dp6549.pdf Azam, Mehtabul (2012): Change in Wage Structure in Urban India, 1983-2004: A Quantile Regression Decomposition, World Development, 40 (6), pp 1135-50. Bandyopadhyay, D (1986): Land Reforms in India: An Analysis, Economic & Political Weekly, 21 (25-26), pp A50-56. Bardhan, Pranab (2010): Awakening Giants: Feet of Clay (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Behrman, Jere, Nancy Birdsall and Miguel Szekely (2001): Intergenerational Mobility in Latin America: Deeper Markets and Better Schools Make a Difference, in Nancy Birdsall and Carol Graham (ed.), New Markets, New Opportunities: Economic and Social Mobility in a Changing World (Washington DC: Brookings), pp 135-67. Berg, Andrew and Jonathan Ostry (2011): Inequality and Unsustainable Growth: Two Sides of the Same Coin?, IMF Staff Discussion Note SDN/11/08, available at http://www.imf.org/ external/pubs/ft/sdn/2011/sdn1108.pdf Bertrand, Marianne, Rema Hanna and Sendhil Mullainathan (2010): Afrmative Action in Education: Evidence from Engineering College Admissions in India, Journal of Public Economics, 94 (1-2), pp 16-29. Birdsall, Nancy and Carol Graham (2000): Mobility and Markets: Conceptual Issues and Policy Questions in Nancy Birdsall and Carol Graham (ed.), New Markets, New Opportunities: Economic and Social Mobility in a Changing World (Washington DC: Brookings), pp 3-21. Bourdieu, Pierre (1986): The Forms of Capital in J G Richardson (ed.), Handbook of Theory: Research for the Sociology of Education (New York: Greenwood Press), pp 241-58. Bowles, Samuel and Herbert Gintis (2002): The Inheritance of Inequality, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 16 (3), pp 3-30. Bowles, Samuel, Herbert Gintis and Melissa Osborne Groves (2005): Introduction in Samuel Bowles, Herbert Gintis and Melissa Osborne Groves (ed.), Unequal Chances: Family Background and Economic Success (Princeton: Princeton University Press), pp 1-22. Breen, Richard (2010): Education Expansion and Social Mobility in the 20th Century, Social Forces, 89 (2), pp 365-88. Buchmann, Claudia and Emily Hannum (2001): Education and Stratication in Developing Countries: A Review of Theories and Research, Annual Review of Sociology, 27, pp 77-102. Cain, J Salcedo, Rana Hasan, Rhoda Magsombol and Ajay Tandon (2010): Accounting for Inequality in India: Evidence from Household Expenditures, World Development, 38 (93), pp 282-97. Carter, Michael R and Christopher B Barrett (2006): The Economics of Poverty Traps and Persistent Poverty: An Asset-Based Approach, Journal of Development Studies, 42 (2), pp 178-99. Castaneda, Tarsicio and Enrique Aldaz-Carroll (1999): The Intergenerational Transmission of Poverty: Some Causes and Policy Implications, Inter-American Development Bank Discussion Paper, available at www.iadb.org/sds/ doc/1258eng.pdf Chamarbagwala, Rubiana (2006): Economic Liberalization and Wage Inequality in India, World Development, 34 (12), pp 1997-2015. Chaudhuri, Shubham and Martin Ravallion (1994): How Well Do Static Indicators Identify the Chronic Poor?, Journal of Public Economics, 53, pp 367-94. Cook, C, F Heath and R Thompson (2000): A MetaAnalysis of Response Rates in Web- or InternetBased Surveys, Educational and Psychological Measurements, 60 (6), pp 821-36.
december 7, 2013
References
Appadurai, A (2004): The Capacity to Aspire: Culture and the Terms of Recognition in V Rao and M Walton (ed.), Culture and Public Action: A Cross Disciplinary Dialog in Development Policy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press). Appu, P S (1996): Land Reforms in India: A Survey of Policy, Legislation, and Implementation (New Delhi: Vikas). Azam, Mehtabul and Vipul Bhatt (2012): Like Father, Like Son? Inter-generational Education Mobility in India, IZA Discussion Paper No 6549,
Corak, Miles (2004): Generational Income Mobility in North America and Europe: An Introduction in M Corak (ed.), Generational Income Mobility in North America and Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp 1-37. Currie, Janet (2001): Early Childhood Intervention Programs, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 15, pp 213-38. Danziger, Sheldon and Jane Waldvogel (2005): Securing the Future: Investing in Children from Birth to College (New York: Russell Sage). Desai, Sonalde and Veena Kulkarni (2008): Changing Educational Inequalities in India in the Context of Afrmative Action, Demography, 45 (2), pp 245-70. Deshpande, Rajeshwari and Suhas Palshikar (2008): Occupational Mobility: How Much Does Caste Matter?, Economic & Political Weekly, 43 (34), pp 61-70. Deshpande, Satish (2006): Exclusive Inequalities: Merit, Caste and Discrimination in Indian Higher Education Today, Economic & Political Weekly, 41 (24), pp 2438-44. Deshpande, Satish and Yogendra Yadav (2006): Redesigning Afrmative Action: Castes and Benets in Higher Education, Economic & Political Weekly, 41 (24), pp 2419-24. DiMaggio, Paul (1982): Cultural Capital and School Success, American Sociological Review, 47 (2), pp 189-201. Erikson, Robert and John H Goldthorpe (1992): The Constant Flux: A Study of Class Mobility in Industrial Societies (Oxford: Clarendon Press). (2002): Intergenerational Inequality: A Sociological Perspective, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 16 (3), pp 31-44. Esping-Andersen, Gosta (2005): Education and Equal Life-Chances: Investing in Children in O Kangas and J Palme (ed.), Social Policy and Economic Development in the Nordic Countries, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), pp 147-63. Fernandes, Leela (2006): Indias New Middle Class: Democratic Politics in an Era of Economic Reform (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Fuller, Chris J and H Narasimhan (2007): Information Technology Professionals and the New-Rich Middle-Class in Chennai (Madras), Modern Asian Studies, 41 (1), pp 121-50. Gang, Ira N, Kunal Sen and Myeong-Su Yun (2012): Is Caste Destiny? Occupational Diversication among Dalits in Rural India, Brooks World Poverty Institute Working Paper No 162, Manchester. Gladwell, Malcolm (2008): Outliers: The Story of Success (New York: Little, Brown and Company). Graham, Carol (2000): The Political Economy of Mobility: Perceptions and Objective Trends in Latin America in Nancy Birdsall and Carol Graham (ed.), New Markets, New Opportunities: Economic and Social Mobility in a Changing World (Washington DC: Brookings), pp 225-66. Grawe, Nathan D (2004): Intergenerational Mobility for Whom? The Experience of Highand Low-Earning Sons in International Perspective in M Corak (ed.), Generational Income Mobility in North America and Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp 58-89. Hannum, Emily and Claudia Buchmann (2005): Global Educational Expansion and Socio-Economic Development: An Assessment of Findings from the Social Sciences, World Development, 33 (3), pp 333-54. Heckman, James (2011): The American Family in Black and White: A Post-Racial Strategy for Improving Skills to Promote Equality, Daedalus, 140 (2), pp 70-89.
vol xlviII no 49
48
SPECIAL ARTICLE
Himanshu (2007): Recent Trends in Poverty and Inequality: Some Preliminary Results, Economic & Political Weekly, 42 (6), pp 497-508. Hnatkovska, Viktoria, Amartya Lahiri and Sourabh B Paul (2013): Breaking the Caste Barrier: Intergenerational Mobility in India, Journal of Human Resources, 48 (2), pp 435-73. Hout, Michael and Thomas DiPrete (2006): What Have We Learned: RC28s Contribution to Knowledge about Social Stratication, Research in Social Stratication and Mobility, 24, pp 1-20. Hout, Michael (2006): Economic Change and Social Mobility, in Gran Therborn (ed.), Inequalities of the World: New Theoretical Frameworks, Multiple Empirical Approaches (London: Verso), pp 119-35 . Hoxby, Caroline and Sarah Turner (2013): Expanding College Opportunities for HighAchieving, Low-Income Students, SIEPR Discussion Paper No 12-014, Stanford University. Jalan, Jyotsna and Rinku Murgai (2008): Intergenerational Mobility in Education in India, paper presented at the Fourth Annual Conference on Economic Growth and Development, 17-18 December, Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi, available at www.isid.ac.in/~pu/conference/dec_08_conf/.../RinkuMurgai.doc Jantti, M, B Bratsberg, K Roed, O Raaum, R Naylor, E Osterbacka, A Bjorklund and T Eriksson (2005): American Exceptionalism in a New Light: A Comparison of Intergenerational Earnings Mobility in the Nordic Countries, the United Kingdom, and the United States, available at papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm? abstract_id=878675 Jayadev, Arjun, Sripad Motiram and Vamsi Vakulabharanam (2011): Patterns of Wealth Disparities in India, in Sanjay Ruparelia, Sanjay Reddy, John Harriss and Stuart Corbridge (ed.), Understanding Indias New Political Economy: A Great Transformation? (New York: Routledge), pp 81-100. Jeffrey, Craig (2010): Timepass: Youth, Class, and the Politics of Waiting in India (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press). Jeffrey, Craig, Roger Jeffery and Patricia Jeffery (2004): Degrees without Freedom: The Impact of Formal Education on Dalit Young Men in North India, Development and Change, 35 (5), pp 963-86. Joshi, Vijay (2010): Economic Resurgence, Lopsided Reform, and Jobless Growth, in Anthony Heath and Roger Jeffery (ed.), Diversity and Change in Modern India: Economic, Social and Political Approaches (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp 73-106. Kannan, K P and G Raveendran (2009): Growth Sans Employment: A Quarter-Century of Jobless Growth in Indias Organised Manufacturing, Economic & Political Weekly, 54 (10), pp 80-91. Kijima, Yoko (2006): Why Did Wage Inequality Increase? Evidence from Urban India 1983-99, Journal of Development Economics, 81 (1), pp 97-117. Kochhar, K, U Kumar, R Rajan, A Subramanian and I Tokatlidis (2006): Indias Pattern of Development: What Happened, What Follows? Journal of Monetary Economics, 53 (5), pp 981-1019. Kohli, Atul (2012): Poverty Amid Plenty in the New India (New York: Cambridge University Press). Kotwal, Ashok, Bharat Ramaswami and Wilima Wadhwa (2011): Economic Liberalization and Indian Economic Growth: Whats the Evidence? Journal of Economic Literature, 49 (4), pp 1152-99. Krishna, Anirudh (2010): One Illness Away: Why People Become Poor and How they Escape Poverty (Oxford University Press, Oxford).
(Forthcoming): Stuck in Place: Investigating Social Mobility in 14 Bangalore Slums, Journal of Development Studies. Krishna, Anirudh and Vijay Brihmadesam (2006): What Does It Take to Become a Software Professional?, Economic & Political Weekly, 41 (30), pp 3307-14. Krishna, Anirudh and Devendra Bajpai (2011): Lineal Spread and Radial Dissipation: Experiencing Growth in Rural India, 1993-2005, Economic & Political Weekly, 46 (38), pp 44-51. Kumar, Sanjay, Anthony Heath and Oliver Heath (2002a): Determinants of Social Mobility in India, Economic & Political Weekly, 37 (29), pp 2983-87. (2002b): Changing Patterns of Social Mobility: Some Trends over Time, Economic & Political Weekly, 37 (40), pp 4091-96. Majumder, Rajarshee (2010): Inter-generational Mobility in Educational and Occupational Attainment: A Comparative Study of Social Classes in India, Margin The Journal of Applied Economic Research, Vol 4, No 4, pp 463-94. Mazumdar, Dipak and Sandip Sarkar (2008): The Employment Problem in India and the Phenomenon of the Missing Middle, Working Paper, available at http://webapp.mcis.utoronto. ca/ai/pdfdoc/DualismAndEconomicGrowth InIndia.pdf Mayer, Susan E (1997): What Money Cant Buy: Family Incomes and Childrens Life Chances (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Mohanty, Mritiunjoy (2006): Social Inequality, Labour Market Dynamics, and Reservation, Economic & Political Weekly, 41 (35), pp 3777-89. Morgan, Stephen L (2006): Past Themes and Future Prospects for Research on Social and Economic Mobility in Stephen L Morgan, David B Grusky and Gary S Fields (ed.), Mobility and Inequality (Stanford: Stanford University Press), pp 3-22. Moser, Caroline (2009): Ordinary Families, Extraordinary Lives: Assets and Poverty Reduction in Guayaquil, 1978-2004 (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press). Motiram, Sripad and Ashish Singh (2012): How Close Does the Apple Fall to the Tree? Some Evidence on Inter-generational Occupational Mobility in India, Economic & Political Weekly, 47 (40), pp 56-65. Motiram, Sripad and Vamsi Vakulabharanam (2012): Indian Inequality: Patterns and Changes, 1993-2010 in Mahendra Dev (ed.), India Development Report (New Delhi: Oxford University Press). NCAER (2005): The Great Indian Market: Results from the NCAERs Market Information Survey of Households (New Delhi: National Council of Applied Economic Research), available at http://www.ncaer.org/downloads/PPT/thegreatindianmarket.pdf NCERT (2005): Seventh All-India School Education Survey (New Delhi: National Council of Education Research and Training), available at http://www.ncert.nic.in/programmes/education_survey/pdfs/Schools_Physical_Ancillary_ Facilities.pdf NCEUS (2007): Report on Conditions of Work and Promotion of Livelihoods in the Unorganised Sector (New Delhi: National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector). OECD (2010): A Family Affair: Intergenerational Social Mobility across OECD Countries, available at http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/2/7/ 45002641.pdf (2011): Divided We Stand: Why Inequality Keeps Rising, OECD Publishing. Paxson, Christina and Norbert Schady (2005): Cognitive Development among Young Children in Ecuador: The Roles of Wealth, Health and Parenting, World Bank Policy Research
vol xlviII no 49
Working Paper Series 360, World Bank, Washington DC. Perlman, Janice (2011): Favela: Four Decades of Living on the Edge in Rio de Janeiro (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Potter, David (1996): Indias Political Administrators: From ICS to IAS (Delhi: Oxford University Press). Quisumbing, Agnes R (2006): Investments, Bequests, and Public Policy: Intergenerational Transfers and the Escape from Poverty, CPRC Working Paper, available at www.chronicpoverty.org/ pdfs/2006ConceptsConferencePapers/Quisumbing-CPRC2006-Draft.pdf Rajagopalan, C and J Singh (1968): The Indian Institutes of Technology: Do They Contribute to Social Mobility?, Economic & Political Weekly, 3 (14), pp 565-70. Roemer, John E (2000): Equality of Opportunity in Kenneth Arrow, Samuel Bowles and Steven Durlauf (ed.), Meritocracy and Economic Inequality (Princeton: Princeton University Press), pp 17-32. Sanyal, Kalyan and Rajesh Bhattacharyya (2009): Beyond the Factory: Globalisation, Informalisation of Production, and the New Locations of Labour, Economic & Political Weekly, 44 (22), pp 35-44. Sarkar, Sandip and Balwant Singh Mehta (2010): Income Inequality in India: Pre- and PostReform Periods, Economic & Political Weekly, 45 (37), pp 45-55. Scott, Christopher and Julie A Litcheld (1994): Inequality, Mobility and the Determinants of Income among the Rural Poor in Chile, 19681986, Development Economics Research Programme Discussion Paper 53, STICERD, London School of Economics, London. Shourie, Arun (2006): Falling Over Backwards (New Delhi: Rupa). Smeeding, Timothy, M (2005): Public Policy, Economic Inequality, and Poverty: The United States in Comparative Perspective, Social Science Quarterly, 86 (Supplement), pp 955-83. Solon, Gary M (2002): Cross-Country Differences in Intergenerational Earnings Mobility, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 16 (3), pp 59-66. Sukhatme, S P and P P Parikh (2004): Women Engineers in India, Economic & Political Weekly, 39 (2), pp 193-201. Topalova, Petia (2008): India: Is the Rising Tide Lifting All Boats? International Monetary Fund Working Paper 08/54, available at http:// www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2008/ wp0854.pdf Torche, Florencia (2010): Economic Crisis and Inequality of Educational Opportunity in Latin America, Sociology of Education, 83 (2), pp 85-110. Trzcinski, Eileen and Susan Randolph (1991): Human Capital Investments and Relative Earnings Mobility: The Role of Education, Training, Migration, and Job Search, Economic Development and Cultural Change, 40 (1), pp 153-69. Unni, Jeemol and G Raveendran (2007): Growth of Employment (1993-94 to 2004-05): Illusion of Inclusiveness?, Economic & Political Weekly, 42 (3), pp 196-99. Upadhya, Carol (2007): Employment, Exclusion and Merit in the Indian IT Industry, Economic & Political Weekly, 42 (20), pp 1863-68. Vakulabharanam, Vamsi (2010): Does Class Matter? Class Structure and Worsening Inequality in India, Economic & Political Weekly, 45 (29), pp 67-76. Weisskopf, Thomas (2011): Why Worry about Inequality in the Booming Indian Economy?, Economic & Political Weekly, 46 (47), pp 41-51. Wilkinson, Richard and Kate Pickett (2009): The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (New York: Bloomsbury).
december 7, 2013
49

Making It in India

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Making It in India

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

SPECIAL ARTICLE

Making It in India Examining Social Mobility in Three Walks of Life

8.5 10.5 8.4 12 2 0 0 0 0 7 3 2 1 0 0 10 4 2 2 1 0

6.2 5.2 4.1 37 42 15 16 13 8 3 0 8 2 0 0 48 25 16 5 4 2

You might also like