7).
Table 7:Income shares and population shares of six social groups in the two rounds of IHDS.
Source: Calculated from IHDS data.
Table 8:Growth in per capita household incomes of six different groups
This can be supported by an alternative way of looking at the data as well. If we look at the average per capita incomes of the households belonging to different categories, our finding on STs is further strengthened. Among the six groups, STs have experienced the smallest growth (in percentage terms) in their average per capita income during the period between 2004–2005 and 2011–2012 (Table 8).
The unfair disadvantage that certain castes and tribes experience in terms of opportunities in the education and labor market can be viewed as the culmination of the discriminatory social practices that prevailed in the past. The Constitution of India mandated punitive action against all forms of discrimination and, at the same time, adopted the policy of reservation in public employment and publicly funded educational institutions. Even though questions can be raised about the efficacy of the kind of affirmative action policy that has been in place in India for long, it is generally acknowledged that without such policy the erstwhile disadvantaged groups could hardly move up to the level they have succeeded to reach so far. However, the larger question of whether the reservation policy with respect to public sector jobs and admission to higher education has succeeded in reducing the gaps between the most marginalized group in the Indian society (i.e. the STs) and others still remains. Similar findings on the relative attainments of SCs and STs and OBCs in the context of poverty have also been noted by others. Poverty declined much faster for all the social groups during the period 2004–2005 to 2011–2012 as compared to the period 1993–1994 to 2004–2005. However, the rate of decline in poverty is the highest for SCs and lower than the national average for the STs, even though STs show a much higher level of poverty (Panagariya and More, 2013).
India Among the BRICS
Dreze and Sen (1995) made a distinction between two alternative paths of development — growth-mediated and support-led. While the development experience of the East Asian countries, especially South Korea, could be seen as manifestation of growth-mediated development, Sri Lanka, Costa Rica, and the Indian state of Kerala could be seen as examples of support-led development, according to their characterization. In this context, they also discussed the pitfalls of what they called ‘un-aimed opulence’, which aptly characterized Brazil in the 1980s. In the 1960s and 1970s, Brazil was one of the fastest growing countries in the world. But the country could hardly be seen as an example of growth-mediated development. As a matter of fact, Dreze and Sen expressed the fear that unless serious attention is paid to the persistent deprivation of basic necessities of life by large sections of the population, India might be in danger of ‘going Brazil’s way, rather than South Korea’s’. While their apprehension has been vindicated to a great extent by the experience of India, Brazil meanwhile seems to have changed its course so that ‘un-aimed opulence’ can hardly be used now to characterize Brazil.
If we compared the levels of well-being among the BRICS countries, we wouldn’t miss the fact that India turns out to be an outlier. While every country in the group has achieved universal literacy in the younger age groups, India lags far behind others. All of them also embarked on programs of market-oriented economic reforms, China was the first where the process started in 1978. Then it was Russia, after the disintegration of the USSR, and finally Brazil and India followed, embarking on the path of reform in the early to mid-1990s. In terms of the pattern of growth and distributional change, China and India have had more in common; both have seen rapid growth, but with rising inequality (with more of both in China). Brazil has seen moderate growth, lower in the post-2000 period compared to what was achieved in the 1980s and 1990s. But falling inequality from 2000 onwards is what makes the Brazil case most remarkable among the BRICS. As a matter of fact, falling inequality has been the most common feature across most of the Latin American countries in this period.2
As the principal focus of this chapter is inequality between social groups, rather than interpersonal inequality, it would be worthwhile to compare the Indian scenario with some other BRICS countries, namely, Brazil and South Africa, drawing on the secondary literature. Fortunately, we can draw on at least one paper that has its focus on racial/ethnic inequality in India, Brazil, and South Africa, among others. Table 9 draws on Elbers et al. (2008). Theil’s GE(0) measure has been applied to consumption expenditure data roughly pertaining to the year 2000.
Clearly, overall inequality turns out to be rather low in India3 compared to the other two countries. We have shown earlier that income inequality in India estimated from IHDS data is not so low. What is to be noted from Table 9 is that the contribution of between-group inequality in India also turns out to be low. The modified formula, as proposed by Elbers et al. (2008) and discussed in the earlier sections, shows higher values for all three countries, but India’s between-group inequality figure is still much lower than that of the other two (see the last column in Table 9). Post-apartheid South Africa is known to have one of the most unequal income distributions in the world, and racial disparity in income remains at the core of this high inequality. Recent evidence suggests that Brazil has been able to reduce racial inequality in the post-2000 years. Affirmative action was introduced in Brazil in 2002, and the Secretary of Policy for the Promotion of Racial Equality was established in 2003. Disparities between the racial groups, viz., black (preto), white (branco), mixed-race (pardo), Asian (amarelo), and Indigenous (indígena), have declined in several respects. Marteleto (2012) has shown that racial gap in schooling has been bridged. Yet, between 1980 and 2008, there was no visible downward trend in the difference in life expectancies of whites and non-whites in Brazil (Table 10). This is surprising since a number of initiatives in the health care sector have been taken since the country made the transition from the military rule to a democratic regime in 1988. The democratic constitution of Brazil included the right to health as a justiciable right. The ‘Unified Health System’ aimed at providing free health care to everyone without discrimination. While all this led to a significant improvement in the health outcome in general, it seems that the gap between the racial groups in terms of such a long term indicator as life expectancy at birth would take a bit longer to go away.
Table 9:Contributions of between-group inequality to overall inequality.
Sources: Elbers et al. (2008).
Table 10:Life expectancy at birth by race (1950–2008) in Brazil.
Source: Bucciferro (2017).
Conclusion
In this chapter, we have focused on a particular aspect of inequality, namely inequality between socially identifiable groups, which is believed to have implications for the socio-political dynamics of a country. In the 1970s and 1980s, Brazil was seen as a case of ‘un-aimed opulence’, the consequence of which was accentuating inequality in income and wealth. Since 1988 when Brazil made the transition to a regime of democratic governance, a number of radical pro-poor measures have been undertaken, which have had visible impacts on the overall inequality as well as inequality between the racial groups. In India, by contrast,