India's caste system and its effects on the rapidly globalizing economy

Review: "Traditional Institutions Meet the Modern World: Caste, Gender and Schooling Choice in a Globalizing Economy" by Munshi and Rosenweig

As I picked up this article and skimmed through it, what attracted me to it was its keywords of 'Bombay,' 'cast' and 'labor.' Fascinated to learn more about one of my country's most well known and most criticized social network - the caste system, I wanted to find out its ramifications on an economy besides the obvious social underpinnings.

Munshi and Rosenweig did a survey themselves of 4900 households in Bombay's Dadar area to find out that the social network of 'jati' plays a much more restrictive role for the boys in that area to continue with the traditional jobs their parents and grandparents engaged in. The "lower class" jati boys end up in non-English Marathi schools despite equal presence and quality of English ones in that area. This leads to their stickiness to unskilled manual jobs. Girls on the other hand, were conspicuously absent from the labor force at least until the 60s, allowing for weaker social networks to refer them into Marathi schools and subsequently lower paying jobs.

However, higher returns to English schooling did exist for both the sexes, English eventually becoming a "caste of its own." Girls were merely able to take more advantage of this shown by the figures that while 75% of the girls' paternal grandparents were in non-skilled labor, only around 40% of their parents were in such labor. For boys however, there isn't much difference in these figures. Modernization in Bombay's industrial market thus might eventually lead to the weakening of a century old social hierarchy. Intercaste marriages and migration to cities of skilled labor, which was a taboo in the past when networks were strong, is now becoming a common practice because of higher returns to English schooling and professional jobs. This has lead to diminished channeling of a worker into lower-paying jobs by a caste motivated labor network.

Although ideologically the caste system originated to allow specialization of labor, as thought of by Plato in his "Republic," the degrading inhumane stigmatization it lead to for the lower castes is well known. I always say that development must not only bring fancy cars and posh bungalows to an economy but revolutionize the masses' thinking for a more purposeful life than mere eating and drinking. This article seems to have shown that in the pursuit of those fancy cars, we do develop our thinking even though unwillingly. The breaking of such a strong social system by less than 20yrs of modernization shows what development can bring in once we're willing to work towards it.