Caste, 'quotas' and discrimination in India: insights from interdisciplinary quantitative research; an interview with Ashwini Deshpande.

AuthorYunus, Reva
PositionInterview

ARTICLE INFO

Issue: 2016 (2).

This article was published on: 16 Jan, 2017.

Keywords: caste, quota, affirmative action, discrimination, creamy layer, higher education, merit, market rationality.

ABSTRACT

Ashwini Deshpande is Professor of Economics at the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, India. Her Ph.D. and early publications have been on the international debt crisis of the 1980s. Subsequently, she has been working on the economics of discrimination and affirmative action issues, with a focus on caste and gender in India. She has published extensively in leading scholarly journals. She is the author of "Grammar of Caste: economic discrimination in contemporary India", OUP, hardcover 2011 and paperback 2017, forthcoming; and "Affirmative Action in India", OUP, Oxford India Short Introductions series, 2013. She received the EXIM Bank award for outstanding dissertation (now called the IERA Award) in 1994, and the 2007 VKRV Rao Award for Indian economists under 45.

In this interview she talks about her work on caste-based 'quotas' or 'reservation' (terms for affirmative action in India) and their impact. Her work helps demolish several of the myths around quotas and assumes tremendous significance in a polity where reservation policy faces severe opposition from the elite even as it drives electoral politics in many regions of the country. In view of recent developments on university campuses in India, such quantitative work at the interface of sociology, economics and social psychology, becomes important evidence supporting affirmative action and exposing myths of "merit"-based selection processes and "market rationality".

Further details of Ashwini Deshpande's current and previous work can be found on her department webpage: http://econdse.org/ashwini/.

RY: Can you tell me why you took up caste as an Economist? Why was it important?

AD: In terms of my personal journey, that choice was serendipitous, in the sense that I didn't aim to start with studying caste. My PhD was about the international debt crisis of the 1980s. And it was not an empirical one at all. It was pure theory for the most part. So I was basically looking at theoretical models of why countries borrowed the heavy amounts that they did, the role of the transnational banks and what impact high level of debt can have on domestic economy of the indebted nations. [There was a] very small section with data because I just wanted to make sure that conclusions of my models are standing up to scrutiny.

And when I sent one of the chapters [as a journal article] for publication, one of the referees for that paper happened to be William Darity Jr. who is now at Duke University and works on racial inequality. He also has a book on loan pushing by transnational banks and that's the book I'd referred to for that particular paper. He contacted me and said he liked the paper. We got talking and he asked if I would be interested in examining caste inequalities. It seemed like a really strange question to me at the time because, first of all, that was not my area of work at all and additionally, fifteen years back, Indian economists didn't really work on social inequalities or social group identities. For both reasons I said that it seemed like something very far removed from the scope of my training basically. It was something of interest in general, but it wasn't something that I thought I had any expertise in, in terms of pursuing it academically.

As it happened, I ended up going for a postdoctoral fellowship for 2 years to UNC [i.e. the] University of North Carolina. William Darity used to be at Chapel Hill, and even when I went there I thought I was just, maybe, going to write one paper on caste because, you know, he was keen. I'd carried my debt work with me because I thought that that was going to be the main focus of my work during my time there. I soon realised that research on caste is not something that one does on the side while one is doing other things. And this was especially true for me, as I didn't have a rigorous understanding of what the caste system was. I knew broadly the contours of what caste meant, but I had no idea of what scholarship there was, so I had to literally learn from scratch.

RY: So what sort of things does an Economist learn in a Master's programme? For example, is there anything that approaches sociology?

AD: Now it's very different. I am, myself, teaching a course on the 'Economics of Discrimination' where I introduce students to the idea of discrimination based on social identity. But at the time when I studied economics, the focus was on overall poverty or inequality. We examined differences between the rich and the poor or between class distinctions or the spread i.e. the distribution of income, which is 'inequality'. We studied how to identify the poor, what are the causes of poverty, what are the consequences of poverty, etc. That is, overall population related issues.

The examination of the role of social identities in mediating economic outcomes is now very common place. In any economics paper or any economics class you would necessarily talk about social identity-based differences. But at the time when I did my MA which is in mid-1980s [the idea was that] social identity was something that sociologists were concerned with.

RY: So what are some of the other questions around social identity that have been taken up by economists in the Indian context?

AD: There is a whole branch in economics called Feminist Economics, for example, that I talk about that a little bit in the book as well (The Grammar of Caste). Basically, it is theory that is developed in the West, but now many Indian Economists use it as well. The idea is that... there are activities that are in the paid or what is called the 'productive' part of the economy, which is work that you do outside of the home for which you get paid or [it could] even [be work that] you do inside the home. It would still get counted as a part of 'national income', as productive economic activity. But there is a large part of work that people do that is in the so-called 'reproductive' sphere. Now reproductive sphere doesn't only relate to child bearing. The reproductive economy encompasses all activities that are related to child bearing, care of children as well as the elderly. So that will include housework like cooking, cleaning and giving birth and taking care of children and so forth. Feminist economists argue that unless this kind of work is done, society cannot reproduce itself. That is, you can't have some people working in the labour force unless you have other people doing this work.

So, gender discrimination happens because people who are in the 'productive' segment of the economy are rewarded for being in the productive segment, but individuals who work in the reproductive part of the economy are not. Feminist economists think of the productive and reproductive parts as two parts of the same economy whereas a more conventional view would say, well, productive part is the economic part whereas the reproductive part is a part of the social domain, not economic. Individuals who predominantly spend their time in the reproductive part of the economy get penalised for being in the reproductive part, whereas, individuals who work predominantly in the productive part get rewarded for being in the productive part.

And women who try to do both have to bear the double burden of work in the productive as well as the reproductive economies. The labour market will penalise them: women may not be hired because of the belief that they are going to have children etc. Even if they are hired they may not get promotions so easily because of the idea that they will be busy with their families and so on and so forth. So opportunities might be denied to them. Both at the level...

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