Does caste discrimination express itself in terms of difference in salaries and wages in urban India? I am afraid the answer is a qualified yes; qualification being it seems to depend on the level of aggregation we are addressing the issue. There seems to be some evidence for discrmination in the overall urban sector but little or no evidence in software and call industry in particular.

Madheswaran and Attewell use National Sample Survey (NSS) data and find that employees from SC/STs in urban salaried jobs in 1999-2000 received wages that were about 30 per cent lower on average than those of other castes. About 15 per cent of this differential could not be explained by the measures of education and work experience available in the NSS data. Of course, how much of this unexplained differential acutally can serve as an evidence of discrimination will depend on how finer the measures of education and work experience are in the NSS data.

In yet another paper Banerjee and his coauthors find less dicrimination in the call center industry and no discrimination in the software industry. So now the interesting question is why does discrimination persisit in some industries and not in others. It would be intersting to see a model where employers choose to discrminate in equilibrium conditional on some factors.

Banerjee, A, M Bertrand, S Dutta and S Mullainathan(2007): ‘Caste and Religion in India’s ‘New Economy’:Evidence from a Field Experiment on Labour Market Discrimination in Delhi’, Mimeo.

S Madheswaran & Paul Attewell (2007), Caste Discrimination in the Indian Urban Labour Market: Evidence from the National Sample Survey, Economic and Political Weekly, VOL 42 No. 41 October 13 – October 19.