Mumbai: Indian Muslims live in the most segregated neighbourhoods—more than one in every four (26%) lives in a neighbourhood that is over 80% Muslim. 

A 100% Muslim locality is 10% less likely to have piped water and 50% less likely to have a secondary school than a neighbourhood without Muslim residents.

A child growing up in a 100% Muslim neighbourhood can expect to obtain two fewer years of education than a child growing up in a 0% Muslim neighbourhood. 

Amid a rising tide of calls by right-wing Hindu groups for genocide or expulsion of Muslims (here, here), on the back of pledges for an economic boycott of Muslim businesses (here, here), newly compiled and analysed data show that not only do Indian Muslims live in sharply segregated neighbourhoods with significantly poorer access to government services, but they also endure poorer levels of education.

Viewed at the neighbourhood or locality-level, disaggregated from larger administrative units of city or district, Muslim neighbourhoods, along with  neighbourhoods of scheduled caste (SC) homes, have comparatively lower numbers of schools, medical clinics, poorer water/sewerage infrastructure and electricity, the study said. 

Suggesting that disparities in access to public services are a significant factor contributing to disadvantages that Muslims and SCs experience, the working paper based on evidence from 1.5 million neighbourhoods in urban and rural India, a granular look through a pan-India dataset of neighbourhoods with 700 people each, has found Indian Muslims to be systematically segregated and disadvantaged, in a manner comparable to the current situation of blacks in the United States (US). 

The study contended further that these disparities account for about half of the urban educational disadvantage of Muslim and SC children in India. 

The paper, ‘Residential Segregation and Unequal Access to Local Public Services in India’, by Sam Asher (Imperial College, London), Kritarth Jha (Development Data Lab), Anjali Adukia (University of Chicago), Paul Novosad (Dartmouth College) and Brandon Tan (International Monetary Fund), is based on data from 2011 to 2013, though it says the neighbourhood patterns it describes are likely to be persistent, having emerged over decades of migration and policy.  

“The inequality in public service provision was more systematic than we anticipated,” said Novosad, professor of economics at Dartmouth College and co-founder of the Development Data Lab, which uses econometric and machine learning tools to generate policy-relevant insights. “You can see it in virtually every public service we measured, for both Muslim and SC neighbourhoods.”

Segregation is one of the most important contributors to persistent racial inequality in the United States, he said, where Black Americans have remained marginalised even 150 years after the end of slavery. “In India, we know that cities are segregated, but there have been too few data collection exercises that allow it to be described at the city and neighbourhood level, and almost none before our study that could map public services to neighbourhoods.”

Studies on the impact of segregation offer insights for policy. In the US and in South Africa, residential segregation was found to be at the centre of restricted socio-economic opportunities and mobility for marginalised groups, also affecting housing conditions, education and employment opportunities and, thereby, people's ability to improve their economic status.

In India, voluntary and involuntary segregation has traditionally limited interaction between SCs and other Hindu caste groups and similarly between Muslims and Hindus, a reality not altered by the process of urbanisation. Earlier studies have shown (here, here) that Indian cities are characterised by a high degree of inequality in the availability of services like piped water and sewage, with Dalits and Adivasis facing the brunt of the deficit. 

In a 2015 paper, economist Sukhadeo Thorat found that rental housing is commonly denied to Dalits and Muslims, with Muslims experiencing greater discrimination. 

The 2023 working paper concluded that while the scheduled castes (SCs) also live in segregated colonies, they are a little more integrated in comparison—17% of urban SCs live in neighbourhoods with a minimum of 80% SC households. 

“Indians of all social classes are very comfortable with segregation and the belief that social groups are better off if they keep to themselves — too comfortable,” Novosad told Article 14, calling it a universal human tendency to resist integration. 

The US experience with segregated housing and inequality left “a poisonous legacy” for which Americans are still paying the price, he said, responding to why it was important for Indian cities to be recast as well-integrated urban spaces. “There is this persistent myth that you can help one group by keeping another group down, but it just sows social conflict, which is worse for everyone.”

Every Government Service Worse In These Localities

Holding that government-supplied public services were less likely to be found in neighbourhoods with high numbers of Muslims or SCs, the study found this to be true for nearly every service researchers could measure, including secondary schools, clinics and hospitals, electricity, water and sewerage. 

The differences in service access were statistically significant and substantial, the report found. 

“Private providers are not making up for the reduced service access of marginalised groups,” the study said. “In fact, private services also systematically locate away from marginalised group neighbourhoods, in part because these neighbourhoods are poorer.”

So, while a 100% Muslim locality is 10% less likely to have piped water infrastructure and 50% less likely to have a secondary school as compared to a non-Muslim neighbourhood, for government-run schools and clinics, the disadvantage in Muslim neighbourhoods is double the disadvantage in SC neighbourhoods. 

For electricity, water and drainage, it is Dalits, who on average suffer poorer access or neighbourhood-level disadvantages.

Neighbourhoods with more than 50% Muslims stood out for being particularly underprovisioned in terms of public schools. This was true for rural locations too.

For household infrastructure services (access to electricity, closed drainage and clean water supply), services measured only in urban areas, all three services were systematically less available in both Muslim and SC neighbourhoods, with the latter being the most poorly served.

“In short, the urban political economy equilibrium systematically results in marginalised groups living in neighbourhoods that are less well-served by public facilities,” the study said. 

Disparities Among Neighbourhoods Within Cities, Districts

Disparities at the neighbourhood level were more pronounced than at the district level. The study found districts and sub-districts with large SC populations to have more public facilities on average, but at the level of SC-dominated neighbourhoods within such a sub-district, nearly all of these advantages are eliminated. 

The study considered allocation of public services at the neighbourhood-level, disaggregated from the district and city levels. While policy design, budgetary allocations, expenditure and execution are focused on the district or larger administrative units, the study looked at whether policies and plans have equal impacts across various neighbourhoods within a district.

This was important because more aggregated data may not show unequal service allocation even though central and state funds and schemes may be spread unequally among neighbourhoods within a city. “This creates a potential blind spot for policy makers,” the study said, adding that neighbourhood-level misallocations may go unchecked or unobserved. 

For SC neighbourhoods, the allocation of health centres and secondary schools is actually higher in states, districts, towns and villages, a result of policy designed to improve access to education for Dalits. However, within towns and villages, the distribution of schools and clinics is “highly regressive across neighbourhoods, undoing almost all of the progressivity at higher levels of government,” said the study. 

This pattern is significant because public expenditure arising from affirmative action policies for Dalits typically focuses on higher units of aggregation, such as a district or city. If the less formal political processes that help direct public expenditure into specific neighbourhoods remain cut off from the affirmative action policy, this may undo progressive allocations at higher levels of government, according to the study.  

The study found nearly all allocations that caused segregation to be at the neighbourhood-level within a city, the most informal and least studied form of government. This is also the level of government that faces the least scrutiny, functioning at the greatest distance from the rooms where affirmative action policies are designed.

District-level analyses may show  that disadvantages in access to services for SCs had closed or even been reversed in some states and districts. Within a district, however, if those public services targeted only wealthy neighbourhoods, marginalised groups’ access to services may be radically different from the district average. 

The data studied covered 1.5 million urban and rural neighbourhoods spanning all of India. In rural areas, the sample was highly representative, covering 81% of rural sub-districts and 84% of rural people. While not totally representative in urban areas, the sample covered 48% of towns and 77% of India’s urban population.

Asked how Indian cities came to be segregated in this manner, Novosad said a rebuilding of rural social structures in urban regions was a plausible explanation, though some historical qualitative literature suggests that India's cities used to be more integrated across religions, with neighbourhoods divided more along the lines of occupation rather than faith. 

“There are historical surveys from many cities that go way back, but few of them have been digitised or cleaned up—I think these questions are answerable but need additional research,” he said.

Outcomes Worse For Children, Students In Marginalised Areas

On how this disparate access to public services including schools affects the well-being of people in these neighbourhoods, the study looked at educational outcomes among youngsters aged 17–18 years.

The Sachar Committee Report of 2006 had pegged the educational levels of Muslims as being comparable to, or worse than, the country’s most backward communities. In May 2023, Christophe Jaffrelot, professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at King's India Institute, London, and non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; and A Kalaiyarasan, professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies, wrote that Muslims’ marginalisation had deepened since. 

Dalits in 2017-18 and Adivasis in 2020-21 overtook Indian Muslims’ educational levels, they said, with enrollment of Muslim students dropping by 8% from 2019-20, an “absolute decline that has never happened in the recent past for any group”.

According to the segregation paper, young people in SC or Muslim neighbourhoods had systematically worse outcomes than children in non-marginalised neighbourhoods in the same cities. This was true even for non-SC and non-Muslim children growing up in these localities. 

A child growing up in a 100% Muslim neighbourhood could expect to obtain two fewer years of education than a child growing up in a 0% Muslim neighbourhood, while children in SC neighbourhoods also faced a similar, though slightly smaller,  penalty. “This neighbourhood effect explains about half of the urban educational disadvantage of SC and Muslim children,” the paper said. 

Overall, Novosad said their study only scratched the surface. 

“What policies have been effective at reducing segregation, and have they improved marginalised group outcomes? What are the cities where social groups have become most integrated, and what are the consequences? There's also a lot of excellent work on policies that improve attitudes toward other groups and create opportunities for integration,” he said, citing a 2021 study on integrating men from different caste groups to play together in cricket league teams. 

He said such activities should operate at scale, and in schools.

“... ultimately we are more similar with people from outgroups than we expect, and history shows us that there is no such thing as separate but equal,” he said.

(Kavitha Iyer is a senior editor with Article 14 and the author of ‘Landscapes of Loss’, a book on India’s farm crisis.) 

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