Kannan’s conclusion, ‘It is clear that the burden of poverty is concentrated among the socially disadvantaged groups – Dalits/Adivasis and Muslims – to a very significant degree’ (2018: 35), is unquestionably correct, and reflects ‘durable inequalities’. These are illuminated by the ethnographic research, in five sites, spread across India, reported by Alpa Shah, Jens Lerche and their co-workers in the book Ground Down by Growth: Tribe, Caste and Inequality in Twenty-First Century India (2018). The anthropologists found that the casual labour supplied especially by Dalits and adivasis, some of it by Dalits and adivasis from eastern India who have travelled across the country for work, is a significant factor in the processes of accumulation that are going on. Shah and Lerche argue that ‘the entrenchment of social difference in the expansion of capitalism takes place through at least three inter-related processes: inherited inequalities of power; super-exploitation based on casual migrant labour; and conjugated oppression (that is the intertwined multiple oppressions based on caste, tribe, class, gender, and region)’ (Shah and Lerche 2018: 2, emphasis in the original). Here they are referring to inequalities of power between people that are inherited from local caste hierarchies and from historic class differences related to landholding and occupations in the rural economy; to the kind of exploitation of migrant casual labour that is richly documented in their ethnographies, and that sees employers using a range of tactics to ensure that labour remains insecure and dependent; and to the ways in which ideologies of caste and patriarchy intersect with class exploitation to produce oppression. These three processes produce durable inequality (and see chapter 11).

The significance of these enduring inequalities, grounded in rigid social discrimination – that is to be equated with racism – is shown up, as well, in research on social and economic mobility in India. Between 2009 and 2012, Anirudh Krishna and a team of researchers interviewed more than 2,000 people who had gained admission to one of five engineering colleges, or eight business schools, or to one of three different classes of government employees. He was interested in the social backgrounds of those who are able to gain admission to the kinds of institutions from which it is possible to enter into the most sought-after careers. One conclusion was outstanding: people brought up in rural areas are at severe disadvantage in gaining entry. The chances of gaining admission for individuals who are poor, rural, Scheduled Caste or Scheduled Tribe (75 per cent of whom in the case of SCs and more than 90 per cent in the case of STs are rural, according to any definition), and who are women, are virtually zero (although women from relatively privileged urban backgrounds are now doing quite well). Very few SCs and STs are able to gain entry, and the numbers of Muslims are less than half, in proportion to their share in the population of India. The parents of new entrants to these prestigious institutions tend to be highly educated themselves, and in professional positions. More than 90 per cent had fathers with college degrees and mothers with at least high school education – when, in 2005 (according to data from the India Human Development Survey), in only 7 per cent of rural and 15 per cent of urban households did both fathers and mothers have at least high school education. In all societies, elites tend to reproduce themselves, but the tendency is particularly marked in India, and the odds of entry to the top-ranked educational institutions are stacked very heavily against those from social groups that have historically been discriminated against.

      More generally, research in India shows a high level of intergenerational continuity in occupation type and income category. Drawing on data from the Indian Human Development Survey of 2011–12, Iversen et al. (2017) find the probability of any large inter-generational ascents to be very low, and there is no clear evidence of improving mobility over time. India also compares unfavourably with China, these researchers find, as regards mobility. There is a higher degree of social mobility among urban residents, and there are especially high risks of downward mobility among people living in rural areas. There is notably low mobility among Scheduled Castes and Tribes, and a particular risk of downward mobility for the sons of SC and ST professionals. Studies both of the difficulties of access for Dalits into good jobs, and of the particular constraints on Dalit entrepreneurship, very clearly show up the significance of the durable inequalities from which they suffer (Harriss-White et al. 2014; Thorat and Newman 2010).

Krishna’s studies, with others, of both poverty dynamics and the severe limits on socio-economic mobility in contemporary India, draw attention to the significance of the failure of the Indian economy, in spite of high rates of growth, to create very many employment opportunities. This is a problem that was very clearly recognized by Narendra Modi in the course of his campaign for election as prime minister in 2014, and his promises to create more opportunities accounted for at least some of the support that he garnered among younger people. Modi promised to create 250 million jobs in a decade – but the first year of his tenure, 2015, saw the fewest jobs created since 2008. It is a salutary fact, on which we will comment further in the next chapter, that the economy, during Modi’s term as prime minister in 2014–19, signally failed to generate more productive employment. But the constraints on mobility also have to do with failures on what Krishna refers to as ‘the preparation side’ – especially the problem of unequal and low-quality education, shown up in the strong evidence from the Annual Status of Education Reports (ASER) of the NGO, Pratham, of declining standards of basic literacy and numeracy from already low levels, over the years since the passage of the Right to Education Act in 2009 (Harriss 2017). The quality of technical training, too, in India, is poor – the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report has commented on India’s ‘miserable performance’, in regard to ‘technology-readiness, higher education, training and skill development’ (and see chapter 13).

      Krishna’s studies of the few exceptions, of young people from poor rural backgrounds who have made