New Delhi: Business owners from Dalit communities earn 16% less than other business owners, including those from other disadvantaged communities, a study on income patterns of different population groups has found.
Researchers believe that this reflects the social stigmatisation faced by Dalit communities.
A key finding of the study suggests that ‘social capital’, widely regarded as a positive force in countering social stigma, did not help enhance the incomes of business owners belonging to Dalit communities.
According to the study, social capital had a positive impact on other marginalised groups such as Other Backward Classes (OBCs), Scheduled Tribes (STs) and Muslims – the greater their social capital, the higher their income levels. However, for Dalit communities or Scheduled Castes (SCs), social capital helped much less, resulting in an income disadvantage compared to others with the same levels of social capital.
“This was a surprise, quite unexpected — it has been usually assumed that social capital helps all,” Prateek Raj, an assistant professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, and lead member of the study team, told the Telegraph.
“But our findings suggest that Dalits encounter disadvantages and stigma which is quite different from what other disadvantaged communities such as OBCs, Adivasis or Muslims face,” he added.
The study, tilled It’s not who you know, but who you are: Explaining income gaps of stigmatized-caste business owners in India, published in Plos One journal, is among the first to explore income patterns across population groups in the country using data from a pan-India survey and mathematical tools designed to cancel out effects of other factors that also influence income, the paper reported.
“We used three techniques to analyse the data. And each yielded similar results: an income gap between 15-18% between Dalit business owners and others that can only be attributed to caste and not other factors such as urban or rural location, education, family background, or land ownership.”
The survey data included information about households’ social capital, measured through their acquaintance with members of multiple professions such as elected officials, government employees, doctors, other healthcare workers, teachers or police officers.
In the absence of the 2021 census as well as an updated caste census, it is estimated that Dalits account for nearly 250-300 million of India’s 1.4 billion population.
“We believe this is because Dalits face a stigma that is attached to them as persons and is perpetuated in social interactions,” Hari Bapbuji, a professor of management at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and another member of the study team, told the Telegraph.
The study found that while social capital’s impact on marginalised groups varies, ‘human capital’ – education, measured through the number of years of school or college education – positively impacted the income of Dalit business owners as compared to others.
“What this implies is that having social capital, or a network, is not as effective as having an education to countering stigma,” said Thomas Roulet, a professor at the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, the study’s third collaborator.
“Our research is among the first to quantify the impact of caste on business income. While we had expected the effect of social capital would limit stigmatisation, it actually makes stigmatisation even more damaging,” Roulet added.
Raj said that stigmatisation does not necessarily mean explicit discrimination but can manifest as a result of ingrained attitudes and possibly practised unconsciously.
Chandra Bhan Prasad, a political commentator who has been an adviser to the Dalit India Chamber of Commerce and Industry (Dicci) who was not associated with the study, told the paper that the results appear to corroborate what is widely known. “Do we need research to establish the persistence of stigmatisation?” Prasad asked.
Milind Kamble, the founder-chairman of Dicci, said, “Things are changing. We cannot say that it [stigmatisation] is over, but it is weakening and many Dalit entrepreneurs are emerging and doing very well.”
