ABSTRACT
Faster growth without social stability is not sustainable. Although India has achieved impressive GDP growth in the post-reform period of the 1990s, the persistence of the social and economic differences in development amidst this success story has been a constant worry. This chapter examines how discrimination across demographic cohorts and social groups are responding to the growth spurts. We have examined the extent of caste-based discrimination between young and older cohorts using national-level representative data spanning from the period 1983 to 2011–2012. Using the Oaxaca–Ransom decomposition method we find that endowment difference contributes more than discrimination to the raw wage gap between SCs and Forward Castes (FCs) irrespective of age cohorts. The discrimination effect is acute among young workers. The quintile regression decomposition results show that for the young cohort, the wage gap attributable to discrimination is higher at the top wage quintile than at the bottom wage quintile. Besides, at the top wage quintile, the contribution of discrimination to the wage gap between SCs and FCs is rising over the years from 2004–2005 to 2011–2012. Hence, the effect of reservation systems has no perceived impact on young cohorts.
