Data on Caste System in India

        It is regrettable that the castes are only informed for people who are from Hindu denomination. Therefore, the following analysis is limited to the castes. The focus is mainly on one of the questions that were asked during the interview. The question was: “among the social classes, in which one do you think you belong?”. Basically, in this research, we focus on the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, because their positions are clear-cut. The two categories of castes will be compared to the non-scheduled classes.

        Almost half of the Scheduled Castes group are in either upper or upper middle classes, while 25% of the groups that are non-scheduled are in upper or upper middle classes. This is unexpected, now that both the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes were anticipated to occupy lower classes of the society. The Scheduled Tribes always perceive themselves as belonging to the lowest end of the social classes.

    Averagely, the Scheduled Castes are more educated than the Scheduled Tribes, although slightly less than the non-scheduled groups. The distribution of education varies depending on the caste, despite it being only a 5% significance level between the Scheduled Castes and the other groups.

    There is also a different distribution of income across the castes. In the middle ranges, is the income gathered for the non-scheduled groups, whereas for the Scheduled Castes, the income distribution is more spread. Therefore, the percentage of people among the Scheduled Castes that earn more than 20000 Rupees per month is 17%, and 3% among the non-scheduled. On the average, the Scheduled Castes are wealthier than all the other groups, which also includes the non-scheduled ones. The Scheduled Tribes income range is distributed at the lower end.

    Occupation also has an impact on social identity, and it depends on whether the position held is manual or a subordination. The percentage of people who occupy non-manual positions is similar between the Scheduled Castes (49%) and the non-scheduled castes (44), while the percentage is lower for the Scheduled Tribes (26%). The Scheduled Castes group have the highest percentage of professionals who hold positions with the most pay. The other groups hold lesser paying jobs than the Scheduled Castes.

Issue with Sampling on Caste System in India

    One might find it strange that the characteristics of Scheduled Castes are not very much different from the non-scheduled groups. The sampling technique employed ensured that it included individuals aged 18 years and above. Furthermore, the sample did not include any illiterate person, which may be a direct effect of the sampling procedure. According to the World Values Survey, there are three levels of education, and that is Primary and below, Secondary, and College.

    It is worth noting that people are averagely more educated in the World Values Survey sample. This bias may be due to a large percentage of the sample came from the urban areas with more than 10000 residents.

Untouchability and Public Infrastructure

    In this section, we address the issues of violence caused by the caste. The use of common resources is strongly defined through prohibiting sharing of these resources with the outcasts. For example, a survey carried out on 565 villages by Shah et al. (2006), found out that almost half of them all, the untouchables were restricted from accessing water facilities. It was also discovered that 28% of the people in the survey were not allowed to enter the police stations, and 18% of them all did not have access to either health centers or roads. The prohibition of accessing the primary public resources is what is called untouchability is most noticeable in the case of accessing water. This untouchability mainly happens because of the belief that the outcasts are not pure and they may taint them if they make contact. The ritual pollution is mostly conveyed by food and water. Water is regarded as tainted if untouchables of their containers touch it. In many cases, the outcasts are prohibited from sharing wells with the higher castes. There are also cases of the outcasts being beaten for having used the wells of the higher castes. In this section, we discover that the violent acts committed on the untouchables is associated with how water is distributed. If the water sources are commonly shared by these groups, the number of violent acts is eventually higher.

    The data collected in a survey by the National Crimes Record Bureau of the Indian Ministry of Home Affairs helped in the analyzing violent acts against the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes. The collected data covered 581 districts in 2001. The people in these districts are then associated to the Census data by the percentage of the population with access to water either through tanks, wells, taps, or tube wells.

    According to the results, as much as the untouchability laws are outlawed, they still exist and are enforced violently. The relationship evidenced, indicates that development programs for water, which target to improve the health of people, has a good side effect of controlling the violence caused by the castes.

Presentation of Data on Caste System in India

        The data analyzed in this section fall under the Indian Penal Code (IPC), and they were gathered from the National Crime Records Bureau, for the year 2001. The data was from 31 states and union territories. The crimes analyzed include rape, murder, abduction, and kidnapping, dacoity, arson, robbery and hurt. These number of violent acts were gathered regardless of the perpetrators. According to the analyzed data, the number of crimes committed against the untouchables is 16 in every 100000 people, although it shows strong variations in each state. At the district level, the variations are even larger.

Access to Water and Other Public Resources on Caste System in India

    The data used here come from Census of India of the year 2001. The data gives details at both the town and village levels with details about wells, tanks, tube wells, taps. The information helped in calculating the percentage of the population who have access to water through different media. Whenever a village had one source of water, the entire population of the village was recorded to have access to water through that source. Some villages had more than one source of water, and the whole village was accounted for each source. The only problem with the data is that the census does not indicate if that particular source is private or public.

    Although the government has tried to improve access to water by its citizens, heterogeneity in water access remains despite water being set as the main target of the poverty eradication program. Averagely, 56% of the entire population has access to water through taps.

Social Fragmentation and Public Resources on Caste System in India

        This section makes use of collected data by the World Bank during the Survey of Living Conditions in the northern Indian states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh in 1997 and 1998. The probability of the village has more than five public resources is analyzed based on the characteristics of the village. These public resources include electricity connection, access to good roads, availability of waste disposal system, public school, health facilities, as well as the availability of bus networks (Subedi, 2011). There is a significant positive impact on the availability of the named public resources, and a negative impact on the presence of public schools. The result is important to the inclusion of indicators of the effect on how castes dominate and the fix the state. Introduction of inequality measures weakens the significance of the positive coefficients.

        This part of the research paper aims at testing the effect of caste fragmentation on public resource allocation. At first, fractionalization can play a positive role in social fragmentation. Secondly, the impact of social fragmentation is not associated with potential antagonisms, because there are no significant polarization indices.

Data and Main Variables on Caste System in India

        The analysis is gotten from the data gathered by the Survey of Living Conditions in 1997-1998 in the northern Indian states (Bihar and Uttar Pradesh). Data covered 2250 households in 120 villages. The two states are the ones that are always referred to as Indian’s poverty belt. The relationships among the castes in this region are called confrontational. In 1998, 29% of the violent acts were committed in the two states against the outcasts.

        Hindus are divided into two groups, the caste, and religion. The caste system institution advocates for social fragmentation. This, in turn, is underestimated by the classification, and it embraces the groups which have a sense of belonging to a particular community. For example, some upper caste may feel not related to other castes.