India is hardly a land of opportunity

India has never been the most egalitarian of societies. But because it’s a democracy, governments have at least tried to expand opportunities for its most deprived citizens: After all, their votes count as much as anyone else’s. New data suggests those efforts may be failing.

One way to judge progress in creating opportunities is to measure intergenerational mobility — the chances that you will do better than your parents have. Indians have long assumed that such mobility has been increasing over time. People from formerly disconnected areas, as well as from formerly disadvantaged social groups or castes, seem able to find ways to make better lives for themselves. India may be politically divided and socially stratified, but in theory, Indians of all creeds and colours can now get ahead by dint of individual enterprise.

Recent research from economists at the World Bank, Dartmouth University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology calls those comfortable assumptions into question. The study’s authors used a new way of calculating social mobility — the expected income at adulthood of a child born to parents in the bottom half of the income distribution — that makes up for gaps and flaws in the data. The results show that, by and large, intergenerational mobility has remained stagnant for Indians since the economy was liberalised in 1991.

That’s bad enough. Liberalisation was supposed to have increased opportunities, not frozen them in place. Closer examination reveals an even more worrying picture. Geographically, large parts of India are doing particularly badly — more rural areas, those in the underdeveloped north, and those with fewer good high schools. Prime Minister Narendra Modi ran in 2014 on his record as chief minister of Gujarat. Researchers single out that state by name as one “with very high income growth but relatively low mobility”.

Demographically, the picture is even worse. It turns out that for one group mobility is actually declining: Indian Muslims. Their prospects are awful even when compared to historically disadvantaged groups elsewhere: For example, Indian Muslim children born into the bottom half of the income distribution are likely to wind up at a far lower position as adults than African-American children born into equivalent circumstances. For upper-caste Hindus, meanwhile, income mobility is already relatively high and has been increasing over time.

In some sense, this shouldn’t be news. More than a decade ago, the left-leaning Congress government in India commissioned an investigation into the economic status of Indian Muslims, led by a former chief justice of the Delhi High Court. The Sachar Committee report discovered that Muslims had much lower expenditure per capita than other communities, that Muslim men had fewer employment opportunities, that they were hired at a far lower rate for government jobs, and so on.

The extraordinary range of disadvantages suffered by Indian Muslims came as a shock to liberal Indians. In response, then-prime minister Manmohan Singh ordered the government to develop programmes targeted at Muslims and decreed they should have first call on scarce government resources.

What is shocking is the hysteria this statement has produced. It’s viewed as proof that some parties care only about Muslims — which is untrue, given that no party would commit electoral suicide by focusing only on 14% of the population. Mr Modi still brings up Mr Singh’s words as evidence for his claim that “Congress is a party of Muslim men”.

For Indian Muslims, there seems no way out. Structural discrimination means they can’t access many opportunities the market economy opened up for other groups. Some studies have found that Muslims get called for job interviews at one-third the rate of upper-caste Hindus with the same qualifications. Sociologists say Muslims are ghettoised in the older parts of cities, losing out on opportunities in a growing economy.

Any social schemes targeted at improving the lot of Muslims are politically toxic, as they expose politicians to the charge of seeking to “appease” Muslim voters.

India’s free and open democracy means Indian Muslims haven’t succumbed to frustration and radicalisation. But Indians can’t assume things are headed in the right direction. The country doesn’t just need jobs; it need jobs that are open to all, especially those at the bottom of the social pyramid. Without equality of opportunity, India could become a tinderbox.