Obstacles to Social Mobility in India—And the Way Forward

How to extend equality of opportunity across a vast and growing population is one of the most important problems facing India today. The ideal of equality of opportunity—the normative belief that equally hardworking and talented individuals should be able to rise as high as their abilities can take them, no matter if they are rich or poor, men or women, rural or urban— lies at the heart of the study of social mobility. While it is intuitively clear and morally appealing, equality of opportunity is complex, multidimensional, and hard to measure directly. Measures of social mobility have been developed to explore different facets of the opportunity question. These measures look at increments, either during a person’s life or between a child and a parent, in terms of income (economic mobility), schooling (educational mobility), or work status (occupational mobility). If most parents are illiterate, for instance, and their children are high school–educated, this is a situation of high educational mobility. Triangulating these findings by looking at economic, educational, and occupational mobility helps illuminate the underlying structure of opportunity. If economic mobility is very high among the richest 10 percent of the country and very low among the poorest 10 percent, it can be inferred that the best opportunities are being hoarded by the richest people. This is a clear sign of rising inequality. Conversely, if individuals from the bottom 10 percent are rising to positions as high as those attained by the top 10 percent, one can infer that the country has succeeded in moving toward equalizing opportunity. A great deal can be deduced about the state of social justice and inequality by exploring a country’s patterns of mobility. Studies show that societies vary considerably in the extent to which they offer equal opportunity and social mobility. There is greater fluidity in Scandinavians’ relative income positions, and greater rigidity and stratification in the United States and Britain. Social mobility research in developing countries is in the early stages, but researchers have found that stratification and rigidity are even higher among them. A combination of a high economic growth rate and a low rate of economic mobility has led to rapidly widening inequality in many developing countries—and the emergence of societies that are home to some of the world’s richest people and at the same time many of the world’s poorest. An examination of social mobility in India can help illuminate some of these larger trends in developing societies. Great wealth has been amassed by some in India, especially since the country opened its doors to the global economy beginning in the late 1980s. Meanwhile, a surge in school enrollment, beginning in the mid-1960s and accelerating over the next three decades, has transformed the country. The illiterate Indian peasant is fast becoming a caricature of the past. More than 95 percent of children in India today are formally educated. But high educational mobility in India has been accompanied by stubbornly low economic and Obstacles to Social Mobility in India— And the Way Forward