STATICS FOR SOCIAL SCIENCES
UNEQUAL OPPORTUNITIES: CLASS, CASTE AND SOCIAL MOBILITY
This paper looks at how much social class origin, caste and community and gender affect one’s chances of moving ahead in society by getting managerial and professional jobs and this trend changes over time.
DATA: National election survey of 2004 contains information on class, caste background and current occupation. National sample survey data over years have been used to look at sectoral distribution of labour forces.
METHOD: Classes have been studied under five classifications and similarly castes have classified under eight categories and both are socially viable. Absolute mobility has been used to study intergenerational social mobility and after allowing for structural changes, relative mobility has been analyzed by using odds ratio. Finally to study the effect of castes/community on social mobility logistic regression have been used with access to salariat class destination as dependent variable and class origins and castes as independent variables. To look at the trends over time, five year birth cohort data have been used with focus on father’s occupation to avoid any impact of life-cycle process.
HYPOTHESIS: Since India has gone through various social economic changes over years, like a capitalist country it is expected to become more open with greater equality of opportunities after liberalization of post 1980s. Therefore, equality of opportunity should rise along with a rise in absolute mobility. Discussion to patterns of intergenerational mobility of men and women is limited only to paid employment.
EVALUATION: Paper pointed out that proportion of Indian labour in trade, manufacture and services has risen but the largest workforce participation still remains in agriculture. There has been an increasing room at the top and agricultural workers and farmer’s participation has declined over time. More women as compared to men remain in