Continuing Caste inequalities in Rural Uttar Pradesh

A continuous mixed opinion on the relevance of caste based reservations and caste as a factor of socioeconomic disparity in the recent period demands update of evidence on socioeconomic inequalities among caste groups for effective policy making. This study investigates whether the caste inequalities in terms of socioeconomic opportunities and poverty are still persisting in rural Uttar Pradesh based on village census surveys? This study used data primarily collected from four village census surveys under the project rural transformation in Uttar Pradesh, 2013. Bivariate analyses, Human Opportunity Index (HOI), Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) and inequality decomposition analyses used as methods of analyses. Our findings suggest that in spite of more than six decades of welfare policies and major political mobilization movements among lower castes in the state, the huge inequalities in terms of critical socioeconomic indicators such as landholding, higher education and wealth distribution and multi-dimensional poverty across the castes are still persisting in the state.