Shafaqna India: Muslims and Scheduled Castes live in segregated neighbourhoods in both urban and rural areas in India, along religious and caste lines, and have significantly less access to public services, as they face an intense systemic exclusion. The trend, though well-known, has been reiterated with convincing data in a new study of the Massachusetts-based National Bureau of Economic Research.
Titled “Residential segregation and unequal access to local public services in India: Evidence from 1.5 million neighbourhoods”, the working paper published by the Bureau says that this exclusion leads to significantly unequal access to basic public services like water, electricity, schools, and clinics within neighbourhoods. These disparities are often invisible when data is viewed at the broader district level, hindering effective policy intervention.
The study, based on data collected from 1.5 million Indian neighbourhoods, has found that the segregation on the basis of both caste and religion is nearly the same as current levels of racial segregation in the United States of America. As much as 26% of India’s Muslims live in neighbourhoods that are more than 80% Muslim, while 17% of SCs live in neighbourhoods which are more than 80% SC.
The Scheduled Caste segregation in cities is just as high as it is in rural areas, and it is even higher for Muslims, the data shows. The study also found that government services, such as secondary schools, clinics and hospitals, electricity, water, and sewerage, were all “systematically worse” in marginalised neighbourhoods as compared to other localities in the same cities.
Researchers Sam Asher (Imperial College London), Kritarth Jha (Development Data Lab), Paul Novosad (Dartmouth College), Anjali Adukia (University of Chicago), and Brandon Tan (Harvard University), who authored the study, used Census-linked data to show that segregation directly affects who gets basic public services.
The working paper said the differences in service access were “statistically significant and substantial”. Children from such segregated neighbourhoods are likely to fare worse than those from non-marginalised localities.
The Scheduled Caste and Muslim communities together make up over 300 million people. Using enumeration blocks of roughly 500 residents as neighbourhoods, the study has revealed disparities that disappear when data is viewed only at the district level, which is the scale commonly used for policy decisions.
“Muslim and Scheduled Caste segregation in India is high by global standards, and only slightly lower than Black-White segregation in the U.S. Within cities, public facilities and infrastructure are systematically less available in Muslim and SC neighbourhoods. Nearly all regressive allocation is across neighbourhoods within cities, at the most informal and least studied form of government. These inequalities are not visible in the aggregate data typically used for research and policy,” the study noted.
The study made an important observation about India’s settlement patterns both before and after Independence. In the pre-Independence era, cities often grouped neighbourhoods by occupation, which included people from different religions.
After Independence, religious violence reshaped these patterns. Muslims from differing economic backgrounds increasingly clustered together for safety in areas that lacked public services, the study noted. In villages, hierarchy took a spatial form. Lower-status groups frequently lived in separate hamlets, physically distant from main village facilities. That social and physical distance lasted over time.
The researchers analysed data from 2011-13, combining the Population Census, the Socio-Economic and Caste Census (SECC), and the Economic Census. They looked at 4,00,000 urban blocks in 3,500 cities and 11 lakh rural blocks in 4,00,000 village, covering 63% of the country’s population.
Since religion is not recorded for each neighbourhood, the researchers identified Muslims using a network that guesses religion from names with 97% accuracy, checked against census data. They tracked public services, including schools, clinics, piped water, electricity, and drainage, block by block.
Earlier studies at the district level suggested that the SC-majority districts were improving in access to services. But looking at individual neighbourhoods tells a different story. In urban India, Muslim isolation is 0.49, meaning the typical Muslim lives in a neighbourhood that is 47% Muslim. SC isolation is 0.43, so the typical SC individual lives in a neighbourhood that is 38% SC.
Significantly, the rural areas depicted similar patterns. About 26% of Muslims live in neighbourhoods that have over 80% Muslim population, compared with 16% for SCs. By global standards, these levels of segregation are high. Indian neighbourhoods are small, with around 500 people per block, compared with about 4,000 in U.S. census tracts.
The study suggested that India’s segregation rivals Black-White segregation in the U.S., higher than in Brazil or Europe, and approaches White-Non-White levels in England and Wales. Segregation is worse in large, poorer, and older cities. Areas with a history of religious violence show stronger clustering, suggesting safety plays a role. Cities with more Muslims tend to have higher Muslim segregation, similar to Black communities in the U.S.
From 2001 to 2011, SC segregation in cities fell marginally by 1% to 3% as measured by both dissimilarity and isolation. For Muslims, who already face the lowest upward mobility among major groups, segregation is linked to stalled opportunity.
“We find a strong negative correlation between Muslim segregation and upward mobility (defined as an increase in relative educational position across generations), which is notable given that Muslims are the least upwardly mobile major social group in India,” the study stated.
The study stated that the magnitude of the disparities is large. Compared with a 0% Muslim neighbourhood, a 100% Muslim neighbourhood in the same city is 10% less likely to have piped water and only half as likely to have a secondary school.
“For schools and clinics, facilities provided entirely by government, the disadvantage in Muslim neighbourhoods is double the disadvantage in SC neighbourhoods, echoing a consistent finding across the qualitative literature that Muslims report difficulty in getting public facilities from their representatives,” the study said.
For SC neighbourhoods, the pattern is different but equally serious. Gaps are smaller for schools and clinics but much larger for infrastructure. Piped water is 26 points lower, drainage is 28 points lower, and electricity is seven points lower. Private services do not make up for these shortages. Even after accounting for living standards, these disparities remain.
“Federal and State policies in India largely allocate funding for public services at aggregate levels (state, district, or sub-district), while the cross-neighbourhood distribution of those services is determined through less formal local processes,” the study stated. Even with the 73rd and 74th Amendments to the Constitution giving local power, states still control much in cities. Politics, brokers, and protests influence where schools, water, and drainage are built.
Muslims face bigger disadvantages in schools and clinics, while SCs are hit harder by infrastructure gaps. The distance of schools reduces the enrolment of girls, while skipped water or electricity lines leave no alternatives. The study pointed out that policymakers often see districts, but the inequality operates at the neighbourhood level.
