Caste Off
India’s rural voters tossed the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party out of power in 2004 because they felt left out of India’s economic boom. But the caste system — a religiously inspired form of social hierarchy — may be holding these voters back more than any government policy. Two economists, Karla Hoff and Priyanka Pandey, set ...
India's rural voters tossed the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party out of power in 2004 because they felt left out of India's economic boom. But the caste system -- a religiously inspired form of social hierarchy -- may be holding these voters back more than any government policy.
India’s rural voters tossed the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party out of power in 2004 because they felt left out of India’s economic boom. But the caste system — a religiously inspired form of social hierarchy — may be holding these voters back more than any government policy.
Two economists, Karla Hoff and Priyanka Pandey, set out to discover what effect, if any, the caste system has on economic performance. In a north Indian village, the researchers offered a group of 11-12-year-old boys money for each puzzle they solved within an allotted period of time. The low-caste boys did slightly better than their high-caste counterparts when they weren’t aware of each other’s social rank before the exercise. However, everyone’s performance suffered after the caste of each student was announced in a roll call. "We thought that the low-caste children were either expecting to be discriminated against, felt more anxious, or both," says Hoff.
A second experiment designed to answer that question revealed that low-caste boys were most motivated to perform when the criteria were objective and fixed, and least motivated when the grading seemed subjective. "The low-caste children expected to be unfairly treated when caste was made salient, which for these children, happens to be every day of their lives," says Hoff, who will publish the findings in an upcoming issue of Economics of Transition.
Officially, caste is outlawed by the Indian constitution, which was written in 1948 by a member of the lowest "untouchable" caste. The government has practiced affirmative action for years in an effort to address the problem, reserving seats in state legislatures, schools, and bureaucracies for members of the lower castes. But, as the research suggests, old beliefs die hard in rural India. Oddly enough, there may be a market solution to the problem. In urban India, where capitalism runs most freely, cash trumps caste almost every time.
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