Socio-Economic Opportunities and Deprivation Outcomes: Inter-Group Differences in Poverty, Employment and Migration in India

The nature and extent of poverty in India is well documented. However, in spite of it being increasingly recognised that deprivation is a multidimensional phenomenon and could be related to the prevailing social relations, most studies in India have explored only its economic dimension adopting the traditional income poverty line approach. The present research tries to broaden the framework of poverty analysis first by adopting a multi-dimensional view of poverty and secondly by relating poverty to India's socio-religious structure, with particular emphasis on the role of discrimination on socio-religious grounds. Thus, the major objective of the study is to explain the persistence of poverty among specific population groups in India in the light of the country's socio-religious structure by examining and quantifying the role of discrimination. The findings of the study reveal that the level of deprivation faced by individuals is greatly influenced by both their religious persuasion and caste denomination. As a result, there exist. wide disparities even within the same caste or religious group. The Scheduled Tribes (STs), Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Muslims are found to be the most deprived communities. Although considerable discrimination occurs against the extremely deprived STs and SCs, generally speaking higher poverty of these socio-religious groups is more an outcome of their poor attributes (lack of education, in particular). In fact, there appears to be no explicit discrimination against STs and SCs in the labour market, even though there is some evidence of discrimination against the Muslims. These groups also fail to benefit from migration due to their poor physical and human capital. On the whole, pulling these groups out of their current state of deprivation will primarily require improving their attributes, especially education. At the same time, it is also important to rid the society from prejudices against particular social groups.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo