Infographics

India's caste economy, in figures

Scheduled Castes — roughly one in six Indians — face entrenched economic exclusion on every measurable dimension. They hold a disproportionately small share of agricultural land, earn less than the national average from farming, are nearly twice as likely to be multidimensionally poor as upper-caste households, trail the national literacy rate by seven percentage points, see 40% of their children go stunted, and receive only 55 paise for every rupee earned by advantaged social groups. Taken together, these gaps are not statistical noise: they are the arithmetic of caste.