PRI Brown Bag Lecture Series - Dr. Daniel Hruschka / FEB 3, 2026

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Jointly sponsored colloquium event between the Population Research Institute and the Department of Anthropology, presented by Dr. Daniel Hruschka.

Topic: How well do the Indian government’s caste categories capture social and health inequalities across its 4000+ communities?

With 4000+ distinct castes and communities, India is home to a remarkable array of cultural and linguistic diversity. India’s diverse communities also experience some of the greatest social inequalities in the world. To organize programs and quotas aimed at alleviating these inequalities, India’s government bins this massive diversity into 4 macro-categories--scheduled castes and tribes, other backward classes, and general class. However, since a full-scale census of Indian communities was last reported in 1931, it is difficult to assess how well the government’s macro-categories capture current social inequalities across India's thousands of castes and communities. This paper uses newly coded caste membership data from India’s National Family Health Survey (2015-2016) to assess how well India’s four macro-categories for caste capture social and health inequalities across its nearly 3000 communities. Notably, across a range of indicators (infant mortality, child growth, education, wealth), the vast majority of caste-based inequalities occur between communities in the same government categories. Moreover, other factors, such as geography, livelihood, and rurality account for most of the differences between macro-categories and a large portion of the differences between communities in the same macro-category. These findings raise important questions about how well current programs target the most vulnerable members of Indian society.