Monday, November 27, 2023

About inequality in india

from Gulzar Natarajan. https://gulzar05.blogspot.com/2023/11/weekend-reading-links_25.html Interesting facts about inequality in India The OECD made an assessment of the number of generations required to move from the bottom 10 per cent of the income distribution to the mean income level. This was done by examining the rate of change of income between father and son. According to this assessment, the transition time from the lowest to the mean level of income in India is seven generations, a level comparable to that in China and above that in Europe and the US... In India, according to the World Inequality database, this has widened sharply between 1990 and 2018, the latest year for which they present an estimate. Over this period, the share of the top 10 per cent in pre-tax income has gone up from 34.4 per cent to 57.1 per cent, while the share of the bottom 50 per cent has fallen from 20.3 per cent to 13.1 per cent. Note also that the top 1 per cent account for nearly half of the increase in the share of the top 10 per cent... A recent report from Azim Premji University... points out: “In 2004, over 80 per cent of the sons of casual wage workers were themselves in casual employment. This was the case for both SC/ST workers and other castes. For non-SC/ST castes, this fell from 83 per cent to 53 per cent by 2018, and the incidence of better quality work, such as regular salaried jobs, increased. It fell for SC/ST castes as well, but to a lesser extent (86 per cent to 76 per cent)”. From the Bihar caste survey The sub-caste wise data on poverty indicates that 42.93 per cent of the families belong to Scheduled Castes (SC), 42.7 per cent to Scheduled Tribes (ST), 33.58 per cent to extremely backward castes (EBC), 33.16 per cent to other backward classes (OBC), and 25.09 per cent to the general category (GC) of upper castes. When it comes to government jobs, the general category castes, such as Bhumihars, Brahmins, and Kayastha, had the highest share with 3.19 per cent of their population in government jobs. The corresponding figures for the EBC, SC and ST are 0.98 per cent, 1.13 per cent and 1.37 per cent, respectively. A measure of the differences in access to education is provided by the substantial difference in the percentage of people who are graduates in different caste groups — 14.54 per cent in the general category, 9.14 per cent in the OBC category, 4.44 per cent in the EBC category, 3.12 per cent amongst Scheduled Castes, and 3.53 per cent amongst Scheduled Tribes.

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