That there are also major disparities in the quality

– that there are also major disparities in the quality of schooling, which tend
to magnify inequalities in the ‘quantity’ of schooling – much more so than in many other
countries.
4 . Quoted in Lion Agrawal (2008), p. 214. On Lohia’s life and thought, see Yogendra
Yadav (2010a, 2010b).
5 . Another resilient social division is that between Adivasis (‘scheduled tribes’) and the rest.
Adivasis account for about 8 per cent of India’s population, and many of them face the
same sort of disadvantages and discrimination as the Dalits or ‘scheduled castes’, as well
as other vulnerabilities such as frequent exposure to forced displacement. Further, while
Dalits are a significant political force, there has been little organized political pressure
for Adivasi interests, perpetuating their disadvantaged position in Indian society.
6 . See Drèze and Gazdar (1996), with reference to Uttar Pradesh.
7 . World Bank (2011a), p. 23. On income inequality in India, see also Vanneman and
Dubey (forthcoming).
8 . See Deaton and Drèze (2002), Banerjee and Piketty (2005), Jayadev et al. (2007), Sarkar
and Mehta (2010), World Bank (2011a), Weisskopf (2011), Asian Development Bank
(2012), among others.
9 . See Deaton and Drèze (2002), Himanshu (2007), World Bank (2011a), Datt and
Ravallion (2010), Kapoor (2013), Kotwal and Roy Chaudhuri (2013).
10 . See e.g. Wilkinson and Marmot (2003) and Wilkinson and Pickett (2009).
11 . For further discussion of these and other social consequences of economic inequality, see
Thomas Weisskopf (2011) and the literature cited there.
12 . There is a large sociological and anthropological literature on this; for a review, see
André Béteille (2012). On the caste system (and how it is changing) in contemporary
India, see also M. N. Srinivas (1995), Kancha Ilaiah (1996), C. J. Fuller (1997),
Ghanshyam Shah et al. (2006), Gail Omvedt (2008, 2010), Thorat and Newman (2010),
K. Balagopal (2011), among many others.
13 . Powerful first-hand accounts of this oppression have been written by Laxman Gaikwad
(1998), Omprakash Valmiki (2003), B. R. Ambedkar (2011), among many others. See
also Sharmila Rege (2006) and Shah et al. (2006).
14 . The position of Kayashtas in the traditional fourfold varna system (Brahmin, Kshatriya,
Vaishya, Shudra) is not entirely clear and varies between different regions of India. They
are often regarded as Kshatriyas. What is not in doubt is that they are in that sort of
league – near the top.
15 . As it happens, at least 7 of India’s 14 prime ministers (Jawaharlal Nehru, Lal Bahadur
Shastri, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, Gulzarilal Nanda, V. P. Singh and Chandra
Shekhar) were also born, brought up, educated or elected in Allahabad.
16 . See e.g. B. N. Uniyal (1996), J. Balasubramaniam (2011) and Robin Jeffrey (2012) on
media houses; Harish Damodaran (2008) and Ajit et al. (2012) on corporate boards and
industry leadership; Karan Tejpal (2012) on polo teams; Richard Cashman (1980), S.

Anand (2003), Andrew Stevenson (2008) on cricket teams. At the time of Stevenson’s
count, in 2008, 7 out of 11 players in the Indian cricket team were Brahmins (about 4
per cent of Indians belong to the Brahmin caste); the chairman of the national cricket
academy – also a Brahmin – apparently dismissed this as a ‘coincidence’.