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ABSTRACT
The paper examines whether India’s rapid economic growth and improving access to education has enabled young people to realise their aspirations and achieve social mobility. It critically evaluates the findings of various comparative studies on youth social mobility in India and elsewhere to understand the ‘wall’ or the barriers on movement into the upper levels of the labour market. It particularly notes the role of caste in reproducing class inequalities and enabling the hoarding of opportunity among the very few at the top in the urban economy. Upper caste membership enables educational, social and cultural capital that is used to claim merit and the castlessness of those that enjoy such caste privilege. It concludes by reflecting on how youth would respond to the ‘wall’, reflected in the limited nature of social mobility, and the possible ways in which they would cope with these challenges.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Poonam, Dreamers. See also a rich academic literature, for example, Jeffrey and Young, ‘Jugad: Youth and Enterprise’; Young, Kumar and Jeffrey, ‘Beyond Improvisation?’; and, Deuchar and Dyson, ‘Between Unemployment and Enterprise’.
2. Krishna, ‘Stuck in Place’.
3. This research on young people in India, social change, and politics, was initiated by the Institute of South Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore and conducted in partnership with colleagues in Delhi, at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems of Jawaharlal Nehru University, in Bihar (the Asia Development Research Institute), and in Tamil Nadu (the Madras Institute of Development Studies). See Harriss and Advani, ‘Youth, Social Change and Politics’.
4. Appadurai, ‘The Capacity to Aspire’.
5. Krishna, The Broken Ladder, 17.
6. Heath and Payne, ‘Social Mobility’.
7. MEA, ‘Speech by Prime Minister’.
8. Government of India, Economic Survey.
9. Breman is referring to observations of Max Weber’s on 19th century Germany, in Capitalism, Inequality and Labour in India, 158,
10. Breman, Capitalism, Inequality and Labour in India, xii.
11. See Adhikari et al. ‘Manufactured Maladies’.
12. Bhagat, ‘Emerging Pattern of Urbanization’.
13. For example, see Jeffrey ‘Kicking Away the Ladder’.
14. Bukodi and Goldthorpe, Social Mobility and Education in Britain.
15. Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy.
16. Swift, ‘What’s Fair About That?’, 16.
17. Ibid.
18. Faroohar, ‘Why Meritocracy Isn’t Working’.
19. Jeffrey et al. Degrees Without Freedom?
20. Fuller and Narasimhan, ‘Engineering Colleges, “Exposure” and Information Technology’.
21. Ibid, 143.
22. Heath et al. ‘Determinants of Social Mobility in India’.
23. Kumar et al. ‘Changing Patterns of Social Mobility’.
24. Kumar et al. ‘Changing Patterns of Social Mobility’, 4096.
25. Reddy, ‘Changes in Intergenerational Occupational Mobility in India’.
26. Reddy, ‘Changes in Intergenerational Occupational Mobility in India’, 338.
27. Iversen et al. ‘Rags to Riches?’.
28. Motiram and Singh, ‘How Close Does the Apple Fall from the Tree?’.
29. Vaid, ‘Patterns of Social Mobility’.
30. On this, see Deshpande, ‘Exclusive Inequalities’.
31. Vaid, Uneven Odds.
32. The disadvantage of Indian Muslims was amply documented in the report of the Sachar Committee, appointed in 2005 by the Government of India headed by Dr Manmohan Singh. The Committee’s report published in 2006, presented evidence showing the disadvantage of Muslims to be even greater than that of SCs/STs. The work of Jeffrey, Jeffery and Jeffery, Degrees Without Freedom, offers a telling analysis of the effective exclusion of Muslims in western Uttar Pradesh from most opportunities for upward mobility. Vaid, Uneven Odds, refers to the concentration of Muslims in self-employment and their absence from professional positions, and their very limited opportunities for upward mobility.
33. Krishna and Pietersee, ‘Hierarchical Integration’.
34. Chancel and Piketty, Indian Income Inequality.
35. Kannan and Raveendran, ‘From Jobless to Job-loss Growth’.
36. Mehrotra, ‘India Does Have a Real Employment Crisis’.
37. Sanyal, Rethinking Capitalist Development.
38. Krishna, ‘Making it in India’, 39.
39. See the ‘Young Lives Project’ on https://www.younglives.org.uk/.
40. Benjamin, ‘Governance, Economic Settings and Poverty in Bangalore’.
41. Krishna, ‘Stuck in Place’.
42. Ibid, 1018.
43. Mosse, ‘The Modernity of Caste’, 1227.
44. Ibid, 1248.
45. Ibid, 1250; and see Harriss-White, India Working.
46. Harriss, ‘“New Politics”, and the Governmentality of the Post-Liberalization State in India’.
47. See my reference earlier to works by Fuller and Narasimhan ‘Engineering Colleges, “Exposure” and Information Technology’, and ‘Information Technology Professionals’; and Upadhya, ‘Employment, Exclusion and “Merit”’.
48. Bayat, ‘The Arab Spring and its Surprises’.