Consider the following statistics about a minority group relative to the average of a country. One, the median years of completed schooling of a male household head belonging to this group is almost two years lower. Second, its urban infant mortality rate is almost 5 per cent higher than the average for the entire urban population. Third, a higher percentage of children under five years of age from this minority group are malnourished than the average under-five-year-old in this country.
These are statistics for Muslims in India from the most recent 2019-21 round of the National Family Health Survey. While it is rather obvious that on these metrics the community is worse off than the average Indian, you may ask: Have Muslims been catching up with the rest of the country? Even though these gaps in socio-economic indicators exist, if they have narrowed over time then the socio-economic status of Muslims could be converging with that of an average Indian. The short answer is: No.
These gaps in human development indicators between an Indian Muslim and an average Indian household have been mostly stagnant and persistent over decades. What, then, needs to be done if India has to progress collectively and carry everyone along the path of development, including 14 per cent of its population? Before we can get to any solutions, it is imperative to highlight the markers of disadvantage inherent in these statistics.
Residential segregation of Muslims in India is symptomatic of their low levels of socio-economic development. To some extent, it may be self-imposed — driven by fear of physical violence and riots — but stubborn and unrelenting discrimination in urban rental housing and land markets is primarily responsible for the ghettoisation of Muslims. The recent incident in Vadodara — of protests against a Muslim woman being allocated housing under a government scheme in a non-Muslim majority area — is a case in point.
Segregation not only makes minority communities easier targets during communal violence, it has strong negative implications for access to public goods and services. Anjali Adukia and co-authors, using the SECC and Economic Census data from 3,000 cities in 2012-13, document residential segregation of marginalised communities across and within cities in India. Not only do cities with larger Muslims populations have worse access to public health and education, but within cities too, the segregation of Muslim neighbourhoods results in lower consumption of public goods by this minority group.
Race-based residential segregation has been studied for decades in the US and has provided robust evidence that segregation of communities is a strong deterrent to upward socio-economic mobility of segregated communities, particularly of the Black population. While the ghettoisation of Muslims in urban India has been examined extensively through ethnographic studies, it has not been rigorously linked to their low levels of socio-economic development and continued marginalisation. Why and how does identity-based segregation of people to the “fringes” of our burgeoning cities relegate them to a life mired in poverty?
First, the importance of education as a precursor to accessing good and decent work opportunities cannot be emphasised enough. If access to good schools and educational institutions is limited due to segregation of Muslims, they are handicapped even when it comes to applying for good job opportunities. Unlike the general perception that Muslims prefer religious, rather than mainstream, education, the Sachar Committee report tabled in 2006 noted that “despite a common belief that a large number of Muslim children attend madarsas for primary education, only 3 per cent of Muslim children among the school going age go to madarsas. Instead, many Muslim children are enrolled in maktabs, which provide supplementary religious education in addition to enrolment in public schools.” It is entirely possible that madarsas crop up when access to mainstream and quality schooling is missing due to segregation.
Second, it is well-acknowledged that women’s education is strongly, negatively correlated with fertility rates. Not only does the overall educational attainment of Muslims fall dramatically at the tertiary level, the gender gap in educational attainment within the Muslim community is larger. Not surprisingly, Muslims have higher fertility rates — a marker of poor education rather than prosperity — and consequently a higher share of the Muslim population is young. The cultural acceptability of low levels of education of Muslim girls gets reinforced when the norm within these segregated communities is to not educate girls. This norm is likely to become less acceptable in mixed identity communities where non-Muslim girls continue their education beyond middle and high schools.
The residential segregation of Muslims and the resultant constraints on their accessing quality education and health services are accompanied by shockingly low representation of Muslims in positions of influence, relative to their population. While discrimination against Muslims in jobs within the private sector is likely, Muslims are under-represented in the public sector. For instance, the Sachar Report noted that Muslims have constituted merely 3-6 per cent of IAS and IPS officers, district judges or judicial officers for decades. Invisibility in the public sector occurs alongside inadequate political representation relative to the size of the Muslim population — both in terms of the number of Muslim candidates who stand for elections and elected representatives. Only 4-9 per cent of MPs in the Lok Sabha since Independence have been Muslims, while constituting 14 per cent of India’s population.
Desegregation and assimilation is hard to achieve — as the experience of the US shows. However, there have been effective policy experiments in other contexts, such as Singapore, where 80 per cent of the population resides in public housing based on an Ethnic Integration Policy. It mandates a balanced mix of the three ethnic groups of Chinese, Indians and Malays through quotas in public housing allocations. In the Indian context, policies that influence bank loans and sale of public land to housing developers and cooperative housing societies in residential complexes could work better than legal mandates.
While more data on the granular aspects of the lives of disadvantaged groups in India is urgently needed, our policies should include economic status as a criterion for receiving state benefits. Affirmative action policies in employment and education, besides housing, that account for economic disadvantage (that is, through the EWS category) can address systemic and deep-rooted cultural biases against disadvantaged groups.
When families belonging to different communities live next to each other, they not just tolerate each other but because their children go to the same schools and play in the same grounds, they can form strong bonds that help create more cohesive societies.
The writer is professor of Economics at the Indian Statistical Institute (Delhi) and visiting professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto
