The fifth session of our webinar “India Matters” will take place on tuesday 4 May at 13:00 CEST / 16:30 IST and will deal with social stratification in India.

 

This time, we will welcome Floriane Bolazzi who is a post-doc researcher at the Department of Sociology and Social Research (University Milano Bicocca) where she is working on labour and social mobility issues. She will present some of the evidence reported in her thesis resulting from an original approach of mixed methodology and a wide-ranging analysis of the material and subjective dimensions of mobility and of their intersection. Since its independence (1947), India has undergone profound social, political, and economic transformations driven by the agrarian reforms in the 1950s, the Green Revolution in the 1970s and the neoliberal turn in the 1990s. While these changes have undeniably contributed to the economic development of the country, it is less clear to what extent better opportunities for social mobility opened up to individuals historically disadvantaged by their caste position. Previous large-scale studies of social mobility in India have been limited by the lack of intergenerational data and the impossibility to disaggregate administrative caste categories into jatis (birth-ascribed endogamous groups). Using unique individual-level data for the entire population of Palanpur, a village in Uttar Pradesh, surveyed seven times from 1958 to 2015, this presentation aims at verifying whether the social mobility has increased over time and whether caste, at the jati level, continues to prevail as a factor of social stratification.