Stratified Mobility: Trends and Patterns in India

Abstract

Mobility has been the focus of policy and academic debates. The mobility concerns in the Indian context are interesting as the caste system has stratified people into categories based on ascribed identities. The class-castes interaction provides the lens to understand the mobility patterns in India. This paper attempts to understand the current mobility patterns within the caste-class framework. The study uses nationally available NSS 68th round data to describe and establish patterns of social mobility in India. This study focuses on occupational and education mobility to understand the interaction between them within the framework of caste-class. The paper finds that there is hereditary bias in occupational patterns. The paper also shows that despite higher educational mobility among the lower castes, the labour market patterns have not changed in correspondence to the educational patterns.