Now, let's look at mobility in the Indian caste system
and how that mobility has increased in recent times.
We'll consider the Scheduled Caste and Tribes,
groups which were formally defined in the Indian Constitution of 1950.
Historically, these have been disadvantaged groups in India.
Researchers find that their educational and income mobility
is converging to levels for Non-Scheduled groups.
For education, we can ask:
What is the probability of an individual from Scheduled Castes or Tribes
changing the level of education across one generation?
If we go back to 1983,
that probability was 42%.
In 2004-2005,
that probability has gone up to 67%.
To put that in perspective,
compare it to the probabilities for Non-Scheduled Castes/Tribes.
That Probability went from 57% to 67%.
What we can see is that, by 2004-2005 for both groups,
it was 67%.
For the Scheduled Castes and Tribes, the largest changes
are movements out of illiteracy to being able to read and write.
Now, let's consider income,
specifically the median wage premium
comparing the Non-Scheduled Castes and Non-Scheduled Tribes groups
to the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes groups.
As of 1983,
the Non-Scheduled Castes and Non-Scheduled Tribes
enjoyed a median wage premium of 36%.
By 2004-2005,
that premium had fallen to about 21%.
Just to put that in perspective,
that's smaller than the gap between
White and African-American incomes in the United States.
We can also consider elasticity of income
for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes groups.
That is, we're comparing now the children with respect to their parents.
If the parents earn, say, an extra 1000 rupees a year,
over time,
how much more can we be expecting children from those families to be earning.
In 1983, that elasticity was quite high, 0.9.
That means that the incomes of parents are quite well
predicting the subsequent incomes of their children.
Yet, by 2004-2005,
that elasticity had gone down to 0.55.
For the Non-Scheduled Castes and Non-Scheduled Tribes,
that elasticity in 2004-2005 is sitting at about 0.61.
That means for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes
the incomes of parents actually have less predictive power
for the incomes of children
compared to the Non-Scheduled Castes and Non-Scheduled Tribes.
That indicates rising income mobility.
Overall, for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes,
it can be said that socio-economic mobility has been rising
over the last 20 years.
One Dalit businessman put it quite well.
He said, "We are fighting the caste system with capitalism."
A Dalit activist put it this way:
"Because of the new market economy,
material markers are replacing social markers.
Dalits can buy rank in the market economy.
India is moving from a caste-based to a class-based society
where, if you have all the goodies in life and your bank account is booming,
you are acceptable."
And, indeed in India, we are now finding millionaires coming from
the more disadvantaged groups,
typically rising up through small business.
Looking for the reasons of this partial convergence of fates,
I've already mentioned economic reforms and also the freer economy in India,
but it's not just that.
There's also been a strengthening of caste-based networks
and the lower castes now have greater representation in politics.
To read more on this fascinating topic, well, at the popular level,
there's that New York Times article referenced earlier.
But to take a look at the numbers and the formal research,
there are two papers by Hnatkovska, Lahiri, and Paul,
and they are here and they are both available online.