What are the current policy implications about the Social Identity in the Caste System?

Reservation System - Those with reservations in different integral areas such government jobs, medicine, and engineering fields, degrades the quality of service delivered because those who deserve it do are forced to get out a do other jobs that don't pay well. Qualified people end up doing jobs that do not match their profession.

Family Pressure – This is very crucial because the restrictions are the greatest obstacles to one meeting their potential life partner, and even if they get too meet, family pressure can cause them to separate.

Killings still do happen in India due based on caste, and the killings are honored.

Some politicians in India still use caste as bait to get votes, and surprisingly, a lot of people vote in politicians only on their caste.

Policy recommendations to help alleviate the Social Identity problem

Increase the minimum wage.

        Increasing the wages for the workers who are paid low wages has the potential of removing many people from poverty and subsequently increase the overall income of the nation. Furthermore, an increase in the minimum wage does not affect employment negatively nor does it destroy the growth of the economy.

Expand the Earned Income Tax.

    This has a positive impact on families, lifting millions of children above the poverty line on an annual basis. When Earned Income Tax is increased the living standards of many children can improve while offering support for poor people who are working, like the single parents.

Invest in education.

    The government should invest in early childhood education. The quality of schools is also important regarding resources because they contribute to persistent inequality across generations. Investments in education can improve the economy, which contributes to better production and reduces inequality.

Build assets for working families.

    The government should put in place rules and regulations that promote higher rates of savings and reduce the cost of building assets for working and middle-class households and secure the economy of low-income families.

The Model on Caste System in India

    We propose an agent-based model (ABM) that allows the modeler to integrate caste's main variables easily. The objective of this model is to show the importance and the effect of education, income, and occupation in the categorizing of the people in India (Mayer, 2013). This model is implemented using NetLogo which is an open source project which allows the modeler to create and change the scenarios. This model can be easily adapted to be used in various contexts.

    The objective of this model is to simulate the implications of social identity in economics in India. It gives different options and focuses on the distribution of wealth based on education, income range, and occupation. This will allow us to find out the impact the of the caste system and to find out changes over time by considering various plans.

Entities, State Variables, and Scales

The following are the main variables that are used in this model;

Education – A graph on how the agent can be positioned during the simulation. The edges of the network have the level of education one has attained (primary or below, secondary or college).

Income range – This will be in different categories, depending on the individual's level of education. A person with a higher level of education will have a higher income range, while a person with a lower level of education has a lower income.

Occupation – this is represented by the type of occupation, whether it is the professional worker, employer/manager/foreman, supervisory office position, member of armed forces, never had a job, non-manual office worker, farmer, skilled manual, semi or unskilled manual worker, or agricultural laborer.

The agents used in this model are;

People – these are people who have different levels of education with different income range and have different occupations. They are used in determining the impact of socio-economic inequality caused by the caste system.

The environment in this model is defined by the caste institution which has rules that discriminate some groups within the caste. The environment is characterized by violent acts, access to water, occupation, and education.

Process overview and scheduling

    The techniques of this model are based on three steps: (i) invest in education, (ii) behavior of those with occupation, (iii) behavior of people with income. Every step on the simulation is represented in a minute. The following rule guides the investment in education: if more people get an education, more of them will most likely get a job, which will imply an improvement in the living standard. People with income will have the following behavior: move to places with fewer acts of violence, access to water. They will also relocate to place with less social discrimination.

    The principle that guides this model is that the more the number of people in any place, for example, a town, the more the number of occupations, the higher number of educated people and the more the income. The percentages of those educated and have occupation income, are divided based on the caste-class, that is, whether they are from Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes or the non-scheduled castes. In all these, the Scheduled Castes represent a more significant percentage than the rest of the population (Sharma, Swarkar, et al, 2009).

    Each time an agent (person) changes his/her level of education, he/she may move to a different level of education and occupation category. It can help in improving the social status of castes. The level of education can influence the choice of occupation or income of an individual — the computation of the level of socio-economic inequality when an agent decides to change the standards of its attributes.

Initialization and Input Data

At time=0 of the simulation run, the number of people is 250, and the model does not use data from any external sources.

To initialize the model, the following steps are to be followed.

The education agents are created using NetLogo.

The different levels of education are coded providing the different levels and their expected occupations and income range.

The modeler determines the weight generated for each variable.

The people agents are developed and located based on the data obtained from their profiles.