Caste and Tribe in India's Inequality Regime: Lessons from the 2023 Caste Census of Bihar
Caste and Tribe in India's Inequality Regime: Lessons from the 2023 Caste Census of Bihar
Friday, 11 July 2025: 15:00
Location: SJES007 (Faculty of Legal, Economic, and Social Sciences (JES))
Oral Presentation
In 2023, the government of Bihar, a state in India with a population of 130 million, conducted an extensive mini-census encompassing 215 castes and tribes. Subsequently, a set of tabulations derived from this census was released to the press. However, the government later failed to provide any additional analytical information, likely due to the evolving political environment in Bihar. This census represents the first comprehensive documentation of the impact of caste and tribe on social and economic inequality since the 1931 colonial census conducted by the British in India.
This paper aims to provide an overview of the insights gained from Bihar’s census and its implications for understanding caste and tribe inequality in the state. We utilized tables related to the seven domains covered by the census (i.e., income, education, occupation, housing, computer and vehicle ownership, and migration) to map caste-based inequality in Bihar. All tables have been digitized from the original scanned versions of the census reports released in Hindi.
Our analysis first reveals a strong consistency among the various census indicators of socioeconomic status, which indirectly indicates the strength of caste identity and the overall quality of the census. This consistency enables the construction of synthetic indicators to rank Bihar’s individual castes and tribes. Our findings confirm the presence of significant heterogeneities across individual communities and document the range of disparities among castes and tribes in all domains covered by the census. Furthermore, it illustrates how the official categories (scheduled castes and tribes, backward and most backward classes) obscure the actual intensity of social inequalities and the disadvantaged position of Muslim communities within this framework. We conclude by highlighting the role of caste in India’s unique, multilayered inequality regime.
This paper aims to provide an overview of the insights gained from Bihar’s census and its implications for understanding caste and tribe inequality in the state. We utilized tables related to the seven domains covered by the census (i.e., income, education, occupation, housing, computer and vehicle ownership, and migration) to map caste-based inequality in Bihar. All tables have been digitized from the original scanned versions of the census reports released in Hindi.
Our analysis first reveals a strong consistency among the various census indicators of socioeconomic status, which indirectly indicates the strength of caste identity and the overall quality of the census. This consistency enables the construction of synthetic indicators to rank Bihar’s individual castes and tribes. Our findings confirm the presence of significant heterogeneities across individual communities and document the range of disparities among castes and tribes in all domains covered by the census. Furthermore, it illustrates how the official categories (scheduled castes and tribes, backward and most backward classes) obscure the actual intensity of social inequalities and the disadvantaged position of Muslim communities within this framework. We conclude by highlighting the role of caste in India’s unique, multilayered inequality regime.