Divergent Paths: Toward a Differentiated Model of How Caste Networks and Discrimination Restrict Economic Mobility in India

It’s been nearly eight decades since the Indian constitution abolished untouchability and instituted reservation policy for communities who were the victims of historical marginalization, caste still remains a statistically robust predictor of occupation, wages, land ownership, and access to public employment. The research conducted on caste and economic mobility is extensive, but it has mostly focused on three documented causes (inherited historical asset deficits, caste-based tensions that discourage migration, and discrimination in labor markets) as interchangeable evidence for a single claim: that caste restricts economic mobility. This paper argues that portraying these mechanisms as interchangeable obscures a pattern seen in existing evidence that has yet to be explained: reservation policy is measurably more effective at improving mobility in the public sector for scheduled castes compared to scheduled tribes. By synthesising evidence from government institutions, conducting correspondence-study and wage-decomposition research, demographic decomposition analysis, and sociological and historiography, this paper will argue for a different model in which network-driven migration tensions and direct hiring discrimination operate through different channels and have different effects on different populations. It also argues that reservation policy, which is designed to bypass discriminatory screening when hiring, is structurally better to deal with discrimination issues than issues between caste networks. This model is an interpretive hypothesis that is consistent with studies but isn’t directly tested by said studies. The paper closes by illustrating the type of study required to test its hypothesis.