DRAFT: September 2, 2013
Making it in India:
Examining social mobility in three walks of life
Anirudh Krishna, Duke University
Abstract
Inequality is rising in India alongside rapid economic growth, reinforcing the need to
investigate social mobility. Are children from less well-off sections also able to rise to higherpaying positions, or are these positions going mainly to established elites? This survey of more
than 1,500 recent entrants to a variety of engineering colleges, business schools and higher
civil services – each of them a highly sought after career destination – finds that class and
caste continue to make an important difference. Factors that stand out as significant barriers
to entry include rural upbringing and parents’ lack of education. Individuals who have
succeeded in surmounting these obstacles have almost invariably been assisted by a relative or
friend who motivated and inspired these students, providing them with mentorship along with
career information and advice. A way out of the conundrum – namely, that poorer children
get poorer education and thus remain poorer in later life – can be explored by investing in role
models and information provision.
Keywords: social mobility, inequality, opportunity, education, information, India
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Is India an open and equitable society where, in the words of Roemer (2000: 21), “each
individual’s expected level of achievement is a function only of his [or her] effort and not of
his [or her] circumstances?” Is there significant social mobility, with people from lessadvantaged backgrounds also aspiring to and achieving higher-paying positions? Or do highachievers in India come principally from among its established elites, entrenching privilege
and consolidating social layering?
These questions have critical contemporary concern. Inequality has risen steadily in
the period after economic liberalization. “The ratio between the top and the bottom deciles
of the wage distribution [in India] has doubled since the early 1990s” (OECD 2011: 57).
Wealth inequalities, large to begin with, have also grown larger. “The ratio of assets held by
the individuals at the 95th percentile to those held by the median individual rose from 758
percent [in 1991] to 814 percent” in 2001 (Jayadev, et al. 2011: 88).1
A dualistic mode of employment growth has accompanied and fed into these trends
(Mazumdar and Sarkar 2008). Low-earning informal-sector positions have grown the most,
and while there was almost no net increase in formal employment (with increases in privatesector positions being offset by reductions in the public sector), significant inter-sectoral
shifts have resulted in raising the earnings of higher-skilled workers relative to lower-skilled
ones.2 Compared to agriculture, which has declined, and organized manufacturing, which has
remained static, the services sector rapidly increased its shares of national income and
employment, the most shining example of Indian economic success. Between 1993 and
2005, the number of physicians and surgeons in India increased by 53 percent, the number
of lawyers by 45 percent, and the number of system analysts and programmers increased by
a phenomenal 572 percent.3 The incomes of such service-sector professionals rank very high
among all occupational groups (Vakulabharanam 2010).
A large and widening skills-premium separates higher-educated workers from lesseducated and less-skilled ones (Azam 2012; Cain, et al. 2010; Kijima 2006). Attaining only
primary or middle school education does not substantially enhance one’s earning capacity.
Compared to the period before economic liberalization, there is “not much difference in
wages of illiterates and up to primary levels of education. Even the middle level of education
brought a marginal difference in daily earnings. Wages increased significantly only after at
least secondary level of education” (Sarkar and Mehta 2010: 47, emphasis added).
Those with college educations have gained the most, attaining nearly 15 times the
gain achieved by people with only primary education, whose average real wages have
remained static (Chamarbagwala 2006). In contemporary India, more than ever before,
acquiring a college education has “become key to gaining entry to the most dynamic
Other recent examinations concur. See, for example, Azam (2012); Bardhan (2010); Cain, et al. (2010);
Chaudhuri and Ravallion (2007); Himanshu (2007); Kijima (2006); Motiram and Vakulabharanam (2012);
Sarkar and Mehta (2010); and Topalova (2008).
2 See, for example, Joshi (2010); Kannan and Raveendran (2009); Kochar et al. (2006); Kotwal, Ramaswami
and Wadhwa (2011); NCEUS (2007); Sanyal and Bhattacharyya (2007); Unni and Raveendran (2007).
3 Author calculations from employment data provided by NSSO surveys of 1993-94 and 2004-05.
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segments of employment” (Mohanty 2006: 3777). Significant upward mobility in
contemporary India is, by and large, contingent upon having or obtaining a college degree.4
It becomes important, therefore, to investigate which individuals – from what types
of social and educational backgrounds and with what kinds of preparation – have been able
to secure entry into colleges, especially the more sought-after ones. Which others were able
to gain influential positions in the services sector? Deep and abiding inequalities are
associated with a slew of economic and social pathologies.5 However, as the record of land
reforms in India shows,6 and as scholarship on emergent policy alignments underlines (Kohli
2012), it may be politically and administratively infeasible to address growing inequality
through large-scale redistribution of productive assets. Promoting social mobility may be
more practically rewarding.
Investigating Social Mobility
How can capable and hardworking individuals from backgrounds of disadvantage be assisted
to gain entry into higher-ranked colleges and higher-paying occupations? Unfortunately,
relatively little is known on this score, and what is known so far can be contradictory and
confusing.
The study of social mobility is still in its infancy in India and other developing
countries. Even in the West, where social mobility has been studied for a longer time, “the
transmission of economic success across generations remains something of a black box”
(Bowles, Gintis and Groves 2005: 3).
Conventionally, social mobility has been examined by comparing individuals’ social
origins – examined in relation to their father’s social class, occupational status, income, or
education – with these individuals’ own attainments expressed in similar terms. In general, a
robust correlation has been found to exist between parent’s and children’s socioeconomic
status: richer fathers tend to have richer daughters and sons, while poorer children tend to
go together with poorer parents. Variations across time and space indicate, however, that the
pattern of this relationship may be mutable: intergenerational mobility varies significantly
across countries; within countries, mobility prospects can change over time.7
Explaining these differences has proved so far to be contentious and inconclusive.
Diverse factors have been shown to have varying degrees of influence. Exposing a persistent
myth, it has been found that differences in “IQ cannot explain why children from lessprivileged social strata systematically perform more poorly than others or why children from
privileged families systematically perform better” (Esping-Andersen 2005: 149). Education
can help raise social mobility prospects, but the effects of education are contingent and
contextual. Other sources of influence – including early childhood nutrition and child rearing
practices, race- and neighborhood-related factors, school quality, state-supported daycare
Although getting a college degree does not guarantee high-paid employment (Jeffrey, et al. 2004), not getting
a college degree almost certainly ensures against it.
5 See Berg and Ostry (2011); Weisskopf (2011); and Wilkinson and Pickett (2009).
6 See, for example, Appu (1996) and Bandyopadhyay (1986).
7 See, for instance, Bowles and Gintis (2002); Corak (2004); Erickson and Goldthorpe (1992, 2002); Hout
(2006); Hout and DiPrete (2006); Jantti, et al. (2005); Morgan (2006); OECD (2010); Roemer (2000); Solon
(2002); and Smeeding (2005).
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centers and pre-school programs, health conditions, aspirations and cultural capital – have
also been shown to make a significant different within particular contexts.8 Calculations
show, however, that all of these factors taken together explain no more than one-quarter of
the observed intergenerational correlation in earnings in Western contexts (Bowles, Gintis
and Groves 2005: 20).
Initial examinations of social mobility and equal opportunity in India and other
developing countries provide indication that parents’ and children’s earnings may be even
more closely correlated – mobility may be lower and opportunity structures more
impermeable – in developing countries compared to the West.9 Identifying the factors that
matter, however, remains even more of a black box than in the West.
Few large-sample projects are available for India that compared sons’ and fathers’
educations, levels of well-being, or occupations. Because data are not available that track the
same individuals over long periods of time, such studies have been limited to making crosssectional comparisons, examining all fathers and all sons (or daughters), regardless of age or
cohort differences.
A disparate set of conclusions has resulted from these studies. On the one hand, Jalan
and Murgai (2008) find encouragingly that “inter-generational mobility in education has
improved significantly and consistently across generations. Mobility has improved, on
average, for all major social groups and wealth classes.” Similarly, Azam and Bhatt (2012)
find “significant improvements in educational mobility across generations in India.” The
popular media in India has especially of late been playing up this impression by highlighting
accounts of and by individuals whose rise, especially in the world of business, has been
nothing short of meteoric.10
Other studies come to radically different conclusions, for example, Motiram and
Singh (2012) find evidence of substantial intergenerational persistence and considerable
inequality of opportunity. Similarly, Kumar, et al. (2002b: 4096) conclude that “there has
been no systematic weakening of the links between father’s and son’s class positions… The
dominant picture is one of continuity rather than change.” Majumder (2010: 463) uncovers
“strong intergenerational stickiness in both educational achievement and occupational
distribution,” especially among Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs), both
historically marginalized groups, noting how “occupational mobility is even lower than
educational mobility.” Hnatkovska, Lahiri and Paul (2013: 468) report results that are more
upbeat in this regard, finding “a remarkable convergence in the intergenerational mobility
See, for example, Behrman, Birdsall, and Szekely (2001); Bourdieu 91986); Breen (2010); Currie (2001);
Danziger and Waldvogel (2005); DiMaggio (1982); Erickson and Goldthorpe (2002); Hannum and Buchmann
(2005); Mayer (1997); Paxson and Schady (2005); Scott and Litchfield (1994); Torche (2010); and Trzcinski
and Randolph (1991).
9 See, for example, Behrman, Birdsall and Szekely (2001); Birdsall and Graham (2000); Castaneda and AldazCarroll (1999); Graham (2000); Grawe (2004); Moser (2009); Perlman (2011); and Quisumbing (2006). In the
specific case of India, Bardhan (2010: 132) asserts that it may well be on the way to becoming “one of the
worst countries in the world…in terms of inequality of opportunity and intergenerational mobility.”
10 One such story that attracted a great deal of public attention was reported with the provocative title: “Your
Birthplace, Background Don’t Determine Your Success.” Retrieved June 27, 2012, from
http://www.rediff.com/getahead/slide-show/slide-show-1-achievers-vikas-khemani-your-birthplacebackground-don-t-determine-your-success/20120626.htm
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rates of SC/STs to non-SC/ST levels in both education attainment and wages.” Desai and
Kulkarni (2008) uncover some equalization of educational achievement across caste groups
but only at the primary level, with inequalities remaining high at the upper end, especially at
the college level, while Gang, Sen and Yun (2012) find evidence of occupational mobility
among SCs but not among STs.
These competing visions are hard to resolve using the conventional methods. Until
the required longitudinal data sets have been assembled, which can take a very long time,
new and unconventional methods are required to shed more light upon the critical questions
of opportunity and social mobility in India.
In one promising alternative mode of inquiry, investigators have looked directly at
particular occupations or within educational institutions that serve as gateways to such
occupations. The earliest study of this type was conducted by Rajagopalan and Singh (1968),
and it investigated the social backgrounds of students admitted to one elite engineering
institute (one of the Indian Institutes of Technology, or IITs). Later, Fuller and Narasimhan
(2007) examined the social profiles of employees at one software engineering firm in
Chennai; while Krishna and Brihmadesam (2006), followed by Upadhya (2007), looked
within small groups of such firms in Bangalore. Because these inquiries have focused on only
one college or a tiny group of business enterprises, their conclusions, while illuminating,
have lacked breadth.
Extending the Scope: Methods and Data
The present examination substantially broadens and takes forward this manner of examining
social mobility in India by looking within three separate walks of life: engineering, business
management, and civil services. Within each of these walks of life – referred to below as
occupational silos – we looked at multiple institutions, ranked in terms of quality and status
from high to low. Within the silo of engineering colleges, we looked within five separate
colleges corresponding to different quality tiers, and within the second silo, of business
schools granting MBA degrees, we studied eight institutions, once again ranked from high to
low. Our sample among the third occupational silo, civil services, is smaller in comparison,
consisting of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), an elite cadre, and two lower-status
cadres of civil services. Taken together, this data base, which took more than three years to
compile, represents the broadest inquiry of this genre to date.
These three career choices were carefully chosen: each sits close to the pinnacle of
aspiration among youth in India. While the civil services have traditionally been the career of
choice among college-educated youth, the other two pathways discussed here have been on
the ascendant, arguably eclipsing the IAS as the foremost career preference.11
Especially in the years following economic liberalization, “enrolling in an MBA
program, particularly at an elite school has become for some the equivalent of taking an
A contentious debate on this point has been waged in the popular press. The following news reports are
illustrative: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/indiahome/indianews/article-2159428/Babus-flight-IAS-officersmake-beeline-greener-pastures-pvt-sector.html; http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2007-0701/news/28415967_1_civil-services-top-career-financial-facilities; and
http://www.theweekendleader.com/Dreams/1025/Mules-and-horses.html
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elevator to the executive suite.”12 The number of MBA-granting institutions has grown
explosively.13 The report of the National Knowledge Commission, appointed by India’s
Prime Minister in 2005, notes however that while “the number of business schools has
trebled in the last ten years… many [are] of indifferent quality. The market has already
started discriminating the quality of institutions.”14 Business magazines in India publish
annually their pecking orders of business schools, strikingly similar across different
publications.
Similarly, a rapid growth of engineering colleges has followed upon the rise of the
software industry, the largest employer of graduates, offering each year a large and growing
pool of high-paying positions. While in early 1980s, there were only about one hundred
engineering colleges in India, admitting fewer than 25,000 students each year, the number of
engineering colleges in the country has grown apace, reaching nearly 1,600 by 2010,
collectively admitting over 500,000 students each year – a 20-fold expansion over 30 years,
the fastest within any sector of Indian higher education.15 Once again, there are significant
differences in quality.
Simultaneously, competition for entry into the civil services remains fierce, assisted in
part by salary increases mandated by the central government.16 The ratio of those who make
it in to those who apply continues to remain hefty, with no more than one in nearly 500
applicants making it into the IAS.17 As seen below, however, the social character of the IAS
intake has changed from earlier times.
Corresponding to each of these occupational silos, three sets of original data were
assembled between 2009 and 2012. A standardized questionnaire was formulated, pre-tested,
and revised, before being administered among entrants to different engineering colleges and
business schools as well as to new recruits to the IAS and two lower-tier civil services.
A total of 671 engineering students were surveyed, comprising nearly equal numbers
in each of five engineering colleges located, respectively, in the north, south, east, west, and
center of India. These colleges correspond to three different quality tiers – with one
belonging to Tier 1 and two each to Tiers 2 and 3 – that were determined in reference to the
Bolshaw, L. “Push to Help Women find the Keys to the C-suite.” Financial Times, November 21,
2011.Retrieved from http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/23b91ca8-0ee0-11e1-b58500144feabdc0.html#axzz1fAbUCUcd
13 Starting from a tiny base in the early 1950s, business schools in India increased slowly in number over the
next 30 years. Since the mid-1990s, more than 100 new business schools have been established annually, and
more than 100,000 students start MBA programs every year.
14 Report of the Working Group on Management Education of the National Knowledge Commission.
Accessed on April 29, 2013 at
http://www.knowledgecommission.gov.in/downloads/documents/wg_managedu.pdf.
15 For these and other trends related to engineering education in India, see the 2007 report by Rangan
Banerjee and Vinayak P. Muley, titled Engineering Education in India, available at
http://www.ese.iitb.ac.in/EnEdu.pdf.
16 As Azam (2012: 1145) notes, “The public sector workers at the top-end not only enjoy a positive premium
but this premium has increased between 1993 and 2004.”
17 See http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2009-03-25/news/28435314_1_civil-services-privatesector-aspirants
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educational qualifications of faculty, the employment prospects of graduates, and students’
average test scores.18
The same questionnaire was administered to a total of 802 students in eight business
schools, also located in diverse regions of India and also belonging to three different quality
tiers.19 Once again, all students in the entering class were solicited for the survey. Tier 1
broadly represents the top 20 Indian business schools and besides others includes those six
state-managed Indian Institutes of Management that have been in operation for more than
five years. One institution was selected from this tier, which is consistently placed among the
top-five business schools in India, and 208 students were interviewed here (n=208). Three
institutions ranked between 21 and 50 were considered within Tier 2 (n=333), while another
three institutions ranked below 50 were clubbed together in Tier 3 (n=361).
For reasons of confidentiality, we do not refer to any of these institutions by name.
The names of individuals, extracts from whose interviews are cited below, have also been
disguised to make good on our promises of anonymity.
Students in all but two of these engineering colleges and business schools were
administered the survey instrument online when they appeared for the AMCAT (Aspiring
Minds’ Computer Adaptive Test), a standardized examination that helps students and
employers connect with one another.20 Students in the highest-tier business school and
engineering college were separately administered an online version of this survey. In the
third occupational silo, higher civil services, a paper version of same survey instrument was
administered at the National Academy of Administration to an entire recently recruited
cohort of the IAS (n=117). The entering cohort of the state administrative services of one
north Indian state (often termed the PCS, or provincial civil service) – who tend to occupy
positions just below the IAS – was similarly surveyed (n=38). Finally, a broad grouping of
state civil services, ranked just below the PCS, was also surveyed in the same state (n=63).
Response rates were, in general, greater than 90 percent across institutions, except in
the highest-tier business school, where these were 68 percent, and in the middle-tier civil
A large majority of faculty teaching at the Tier 1 institution (widely regarded as one of the best in India) has
a PhD degree, most from highly-ranked institutes in India and abroad, compared to fewer than 50 percent of
Tier 2 and less than 25 percent of Tier 3 faculty. Students’ employment prospects also vary considerably
across these three tiers. A national employability report, based on a sample of 55,000 students from more
than 250 engineering colleges across India, found vast differences in employability across colleges of different
quality tiers (see www.aspiringminds.in). While this report did not look at the very best colleges (such as IITs
and IIITs, which constitute Tier 1 for the present examination), it did examine differences between the next
one hundred engineering colleges (our Tier 2) and the rest (our Tier 3), finding, for example, that 31 percent
of Tier 2 students would be able to find employment in the IT services sector, compared to only 16 percent
of students in Tier 3.
19 Almost the entire faculty of our Tier 1 business school has a PhD from eminent national and international
institutions. Starting salaries for the class graduating in 2010 averaged Rs. 965,000 annually. Two institutions
in our sample are Tier 2. About half of all faculty members have PhDs. Average starting salaries for the class
graduating in 2011 were Rs. 550,000. Another eight institutions belong to Tier 3. Only a handful of faculty
has PhDs. Average starting salaries are close to Rs. 300,000.
20 A fuller description of this test, as well as details about the innovative company, Aspiring Minds, that has
designed and which administers this test, are available at the web site: www.aspiringminds.in
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service, where the response rate was just under 70 percent, all of which are more than the
average achieved in surveys of this kind.21
Distinguishing quality tiers within each of these occupational silos was helpful for a
variety of reasons. Most usefully, it helped us deal with a basic problem of comparison, not
otherwise easy to handle: Individuals who do not get into any engineering or management
college or civil service are hard, even impossible, to identify, especially if we consider, in
addition to those who applied but did not get in, all those who did not apply, thinking their
chances were slim.
The way in which we deal with this problem is best explained by considering the
following thought experiment. Imagine that the population of MBA students is stratified
according to the pecking order of colleges. People who get into the top-tier business school
constitute the top stratum of this population; people who get into the second-tier college,
the second stratum; and so on. Otherwise eligible and capable people who do not get into
any business school constitute the (hypothetical) lowest stratum.
If the analysis is able to identify some factor or factors that regularly decrease (or
increase) in value from the highest to the lowest tier, so classified, it stands to reason that
these same factors might help distinguish those who do not get into any MBA school,
particularly if after examining secondary data it is found that these factors exist at even lower
(or higher) levels among the general population. This analysis of difference is complemented
below by an analysis of similarity. Factors that have commonly high (or low) values across
tiers, but which are, on average, much lower (or higher) among the general population also
bear paying attention, because they help identify threshold effects, minimum levels
associated with successful entry into higher-paying occupations. To the extent that common
trends are discerned across separate occupational silos, a more general statement can be
ventured about correlates of social mobility in India.
Results
Some such commonly significant results can be foreshadowed at the outset:
- People who were brought up and educated in rural areas are at a disadvantage. The
longer the time spent at rural schools, the greater tends to be this disadvantage.
- Higher economic status confers an advantage in terms of gaining entry, but by itself
does not get one a place within the highest-ranked institutions. In combination with
rural residence or less-educated parents, however, relative poverty has a more
severely disabling effect.
- The representation of SCs and STs within the student bodies of engineering colleges
and business school is greater at the current time compared to historical trends, but
these numbers remain considerably lower than the population proportions of these
groups.
- Women have made the most significant gains among all groups examined here,
raising their presence within all three occupational silos far above the proportions
that existed even two decades ago. Even so, they are not yet 50 percent of the intake.
21
The average response rate for online surveys is around 34 percent, according to Cook, et al. (2000).
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- The majority of those who gained entry have relatively well-educated parents, with
most fathers having a college education and the majority of mothers having at least
high-school education, a characteristic that is rare among Indians at large. A vast
majority of fathers belong to the salariat class, service professionals in the private or
public sectors or self-employed with their own businesses.
- A combination of disadvantages – being rural and poor, or SC/ST and rural, or the
child of less educated parents and female – constitutes a more severe handicap. Only
a handful of such multiply-disadvantaged people have managed to gain entry, even
within the lowest-tier institutions.
- In general, the conclusion cannot be avoided that an urban professional elite is being
reproduced, with the sons and (increasingly) the daughters of salaried and selfemployed professionals themselves joining higher education and higher-status
occupations in the largest numbers.
There are, however, a small number of notable exceptions. Detailed follow-up
interviews with these “outliers” – people who bucked the trend and despite facing long odds
made it into one of these places – show how, to a considerable extent, socio-economic
disadvantages tend to operate via the medium of what Heckman (2011) has collectively
termed “soft skills”: information, motivation, aspirations, social networks, and cultural
capital.22
Rural Origin: Degrees of Rural
We begin by looking at the experiences of rural residents. A point of clarification is in order
here. Classifying some individual as urban or rural is not a straightforward task. How does
one classify someone who was born in a village but at the earliest opportunity left to pursue
education in an elite boarding school? Or someone who spent one or two years at a rural
school, but for the rest of her time was educated in a city? Or someone else who lived in a
rural area while commuting to a city school?
Rural and urban are not neatly divisible categories of individuals. There is a whole
range of “rural-ness,” distinguished by degrees.
To assess where some particular individual should be placed on this spectrum, we
looked at three separate characteristics, associated with different degrees of rural-ness. We
began by examining the nature of schools – rural or urban – that an individual attended at
four separate stages of his or her education (respectively, primary, middle, high school, and
Clearly, some among these factors – such as urban residence and salariat parents, or urban schools and
English-medium education – may be related to each other, pointing toward the importance of clusters rather
than individual characteristics, a point to be borne in mind as we examine the results presented below.
Multiple regression can help tease out the relative (and joint) significance of different factors, but the scope
for such analysis is limited, because a large missing part of the data relate to the characteristics of those do not
get into any of these occupational silos. In these circumstances, we can only compare across individuals in
higher and lower tiers, de-emphasizing comparison with the general population, a critical piece. Undertaking
such analysis, however, and comparing across tiers within the management schools silo (and separately across
tiers among engineering colleges) using multinomial logistic regression analyses, helped uphold the results
reported below, particularly highlighting the separate significance of soft skills.
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higher secondary or pre-university). Next, we looked at their place of residence while
growing up (rural village, tahsil/taluka headquarter, district capital, state capital, and metro
city).23 Finally, we looked at the occupations and the current place of residence of their
parents.
Combining these separate criteria helped generate confluences of characteristics
associated, respectively, with higher and lower degrees of rural-ness. Someone who attended
a rural school for even one year is regarded as minimally rural for the purpose of this
classification (R1).24 Another person who attended rural schools throughout, from the
primary to the higher secondary level, is considered rural to a higher degree (R2). Those who
attended rural schools all through and whose parents live in rural areas constitute the next
higher degree (R3). The most rural individuals in terms of this classification are those who
attended rural schools throughout and whose parents live in rural areas and work in
agriculture as farmers or agricultural labor (R4). This image that comes to mind when one
thinks of a person in India as being rural commonly conforms to this maximal definition.
Table 1 presents the related results.
-
Table 1 about here -
The first general trend to report is that rural India is considerably under-represented.
Regardless of which definition of rural is considered, the proportion of rural people in any
tier of any of these three walks of life is much lower than the proportion of rural residents of
India (which was 69 percent in 2011, falling slightly from 72 percent in 2001). Even if we
consider minimally rural people (R1), this proportion is only 6 percent in the Tier 1 business
school, rising to 24 percent in the Tier 3 engineering college, and to 56 percent in the Tier 3
civil service. As progressively higher degrees of rural are considered, the proportion of
entrants consistently falls.
Across occupations and quality tiers, the more rural one is the harder it is to gain
entry. Not one R4 individual found a place in the top-tier business school and the
corresponding proportions in other business schools and in engineering colleges is nowhere
more than 3 percent.
Among civil services the proportions of rural individuals are higher in comparison,
illustrating what is perhaps an emergent trend: Rural India is relatively poorly represented in
the rising occupations, engineering and business management, and it is better represented in
the civil services. This trend represents a change from the past. Potter (1996: 231), reporting
on the nature of individuals recruited to the IAS in the 1980s, found them to be largely
urban-educated, “products of the ‘better’ schools and colleges,” and raised in cities. It seems
At the time of writing India was divided into 604 administrative districts. Districts, particularly rural ones,
are further divided into tahsils or talukas, the headquarters of which are often large villages and may sometimes
be small towns.
24 A school was classified as rural for this analysis if it is located in a village or at a taluka/tahsil headquarters.
Schools located at district and state capitals and metro cities (along with the tiny number reported to be
outside India) were classified as urban. Including all schools located at tahsil/taluka headquarters within the
category of rural schools (in addition to all those located in rural villages), tends to over-estimate somewhat
the representation of rural students.
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likely, therefore, that as urban elites have gravitated away from civil services, others,
including some educated in rural schools, have come in to take these places.25
Why do rural origins impose handicaps to social mobility? Even when they have been
successful in gaining entry, why have rural individuals more often made it lower-tier
compared to higher-tier institutions?
Our outlier interviews helped shed light upon these questions. Shivana Prasad,26 who
gained admission at a Tier 2 engineering college, despite being up against cumulative odds –
being maximally rural (R4) and female – provided the following explanation:
Lack of good primary and higher education is a key factor. Just being highly intelligent
doesn't suffice. One's mind has to be trained and skills have to be sharpened for one to get
admission in a good place. Poor schooling is a major constraint. Once a person has been
well educated, he might still not find a good college because good opportunities to excel
aren't made available to him.
The contacts and connections that the student's parents and relatives have are also limited.
Lack of inspiration due to absence of role models is related. Students may feel that the aim is
unclear and unachievable.
In my case, my cousin, who had studied in nearby city, guided me. He was appearing for
PSC [the qualifying examination for employment in the state civil service]. He had done a
course in polytechnic. He helped me with my school work and gave me books to read. He
guided me about engineering colleges and how to study for them.
Other outliers similarly emphasized how poor-quality education combined with lack
of information resources (including role models, guides, and mentors providing career
advice) hold back many capable and hardworking individuals. Those few rural individuals
who have nevertheless secured entry to gateway academic institutions and the civil services
have almost invariably benefited from the intervention of some helpful individual – a cousin,
uncle, teacher, or family friend – who motivated them and provided guidance.
Education in English: Another aspect of a less-promising education in rural areas has to do
with training in the English language. In her perceptive analysis of the new middle class in
India, which includes, of course, the three occupational silos considered here, Fernandes
(2006: 69) notes how “fluency in English marks an individual with the distinction of class
culture…such linguistic skills are a necessary component for access.” Examining national
data, Azam et al. (2013) uncovered a substantial wage-premium for English speakers across
all occupations.
Among our sample, the critical importance of English showed up starkly. For
instance, 88 percent of Tier 1 business school students studied in high schools where
English was the medium of instruction (or first language used). As many as 71 percent of
Increased investments in school education by richer farmer families, acquiring a “new sense of urgency” in
recent years, have also helped promote this emergent trend (Jeffrey 2010: 70). Corresponding to the results
reported here, Fernandes (2006: 106) notes how “fields such as business and information technology [have]
replaced civil service employment as the social marker of the upper-tier [urban] middle class.”
26 This name, like other interviewees’ names, has been made up for the sake of confidentiality.
25
11
Tier 1 students attended English-medium schools from the outset, starting from the primary
level. The corresponding proportions for Tiers 2 and 3 are 82 percent and 59 percent. In
engineering colleges these percentages are somewhat higher, while in the civil services they
are somewhat lower, but not radically so, particularly within the IAS.
Those who make it to top-tier schools and civil services are in this sense not
representative of the Indian population: Only 13 percent of India’s schools at the primary
and upper-primary stage have English as the medium of instruction and a further 18 percent
teach English as the first or second language (NCERT 2005).
Few village schools are able to field teachers who are competent to teach in English.
Results of standardized tests conducted among 11-14 year-old schoolchildren as part of the
India Human Development Survey of 2004-05 show that while all types of learning
outcomes are at considerably lower levels in rural compared to urban schools, falling
regularly with increasing distances to towns; English language proficiency is more than seven
times higher among urban compared to rural schoolchildren – 16.2 percent of urban but
only 2.4 percent of rural children who were tested could read or write even a word of
English.
Rural-Urban Migration: To overcome these and other disadvantages of a rural education, many
families have migrated from villages to cities. Geographic mobility has served in a large
number of cases as a means of social mobility – for those who could afford to make the
move. We asked respondents about whether their families had ever moved residence and
whether this move was motivated primarily by the desire “to improve the academic
prospects of you and your siblings.” On average, as many as 29 percent of business school
students reported moving for academic reasons.
Across occupational silos and quality tiers, a higher proportion of interviewees began
primary school in a rural setting, but by the time they had reached high school the
percentage still in a rural setting had steadily fallen. For instance, among students of one Tier
2 engineering college, 11.1 percent attended rural schools at the primary level, but only 7.1
percent attended rural middle schools, and fewer yet, 3.8 percent, studied in rural high
schools. Among entrants to the IAS, for example, 43 percent attended rural schools at the
primary level but only 26 percent remained in rural areas through high school.
It is not only rural government schools where these percentages fell as students
advanced: the percentages attending rural private schools also fell as students moved from the
primary through the higher secondary level. Among IAS entrants, 17 percent attended rural
private schools at the primary level, but only 9 percent remained in such schools for higher
secondary. Among entrants to engineering colleges this drop was sharper: from 19 percent
to 1.6 percent.
The ability to send one’s children to private, English-medium, and city-based schools
is dependent upon a family’s economic situation. We look next to see how relative wealth
has made a difference to an individual’s chances.
Relative Wealth
In order to examine different levels of household wellbeing, we asked respondents about the
ownership by their household of origin (i.e., their parents’ household) of 16 types of assets,
12
including movable assets (such as TVs, motorcycles, and refrigerators), immovable assets
(homes, commercial properties, agricultural land), and financial assets (stocks, fixed deposit
accounts).27 The survey question asked simply about the presence or absence of each asset
type in the parental household at the time when the respondent was growing up, specifically
when he or she was studying in high school. Basic and relatively low-value assets, possessed
on occasion even by less well-off households, form part of this asset list, including bicycles,
radios, and pressure cookers. Higher-value and less frequently possessed assets, including
stocks and bonds, washing machines, and cars, are also included. We constructed a simple
asset index constructed by adding the total number of assets possessed by each household. 28
Table 2 presents these results.
-
Table 2 about here -
The first data row shows the average number of assets possessed by the families of
entrants to these institutions. Notice that the average number of assets owned by entrants to
these institutions is higher among business school and engineering students and lower
among civil service entrants.
Notice also that household wealth and level of entry are not monotonically related:
those getting into higher-tier institutions are not, on average, from wealthier backgrounds
compared to their peers in lower-tier institutions.
In general, the individuals who have gained entry within any of these institutions
come from households that are better off compared to the average Indian household. For
example, more than 81 percent of business school respondents grew up in households that
owned a refrigerator: 75 percent in Tier 3 schools, 94 percent in Tier 2 schools and 86
percent in the Tier 1 institution. The corresponding shares in Tier 2 and 3 engineering
colleges are, respectively, 80 percent and 61 percent. The lowest share of refrigerator-owning
households, 34 percent, is found in the Tier 3 civil service. But all of these numbers are still
higher than those prevailing among the general population. In 2001-02 (at the time when
most of our respondents would have been at or close to high school) only 13.4 percent of all
households in India possessed a refrigerator (NCAER 2005).
Not everyone who made it into these institutions was from a relatively rich family. In
order to examine how many relatively poor individuals have also got into these places – and
whether these numbers differ substantially between lower- and higher-tier institutions, we
assessed degrees of deprivation by examining different criteria, including asset ownership
and attendance at government schools. We began identifying economically deprived
individuals by short-listing those whose parental households possessed four or fewer assets
Incomes are particularly hard to recall accurately, especially in rural contexts where seasonality can result in
considerable fluctuations. Following Carter and Barrett (2006), we preferred to examine households’ usual (or
structural) material conditions using asset ownership as the measure of household wealth.
28 We also used principal component analysis to create other asset-based indices, weighted in different ways.
However, the correlation of these indices with the simple count of the total number was > 0.95 in each case,
reinforcing our preference for using the simpler and more intuitive measure.
27
13
(P1).29 Separately, we considered parental households that possessed two or fewer assets
(P2). The second and third data rows of Table 2 provide these figures.
The share of individuals with less than four assets is not insignificant within any of
the institutions considered here. In the top-tier business school, such individuals constituted
6 percent of the intake, rising to 16 percent in the Tier 3 business school – and further to 37
percent in the IAS and to 48 percent, nearly half, in the Tier 3 civil service. Poorer
individuals, like rural ones, have a higher probability of getting into the civil services,
especially lower-tier ones, and their chances of getting into business schools and engineering
colleges are lower.
Turning to a stricter definition of relative deprivation (two or fewer assets), we find
these numbers falling sharply. Only 2 percent in the top-tier business school and no more
than 25 percent in any institution (the Tier 3 civil service) grew up in households whose only
assets were a bicycle or radio or TV or pressure cooker. Again, to put these numbers in
perspective, nearly half of all Indians lived in a household that did not own a TV in 2005 and
45 percent did not possess a bicycle, according to data provided by the India Human
Development Survey
Yet another criterion for examining relative poverty relates to attendance at
government (rather than private) schools. At the primary level, government schools usually
charge no fees, and at higher levels, fees in government schools are nominal, being
substantially lower than those charged by private schools. Children of relatively deprived
families are thus much likelier to attend government schools, although there is no one-toone correspondence. We looked at two combinations of relative deprivation and
government school attendance: first, identifying individuals whose families possessed four or
fewer assets and who attended only government schools (P3), and next, looking at
individuals whose families possessed two or fewer assets and who also attended only
government schools (P4). These numbers are much smaller than those reported above, both
falling to zero in the top-tier business school and engineering college. Within the Tier 3 civil
services, as well, the representation of poorer people, so defined, is quite small, being 16
percent for P3 and only 5 percent for P4. People from relatively poor households who can
only afford to attend government schools are thus unlikely to achieve significant upward
mobility.
If one is poor and rural, suffering two disadvantages simultaneously, then one’s chances
of getting into any of these institutions become truly dismal. The last two rows of Table 2
provide data for two different combinations of rural upbringing and relative deprivation. P5
refers to two or fewer assets and education throughout in rural schools (government or
private), while P6, the stricter criterion, refers to the combination of two or fewer assets and
the strictest definition of rural considered here, R4. Considering either combination, the
numbers are zero in most cases, and no greater than 4 percent in any case (that of the Tier 3
civil services).
Even as relatively large numbers of rural individuals have been getting into this lower
tier of civil services, the share of rural and poor individuals is closer to zero. The impression
29
Bicycles, radios, TVs, and pressure cookers were the most common asset types.
14
gained here of an urban and relatively well-off elite reproducing itself – with some notable
exceptions, of course – gets reinforced when data are examined next related to parents’
occupations and education levels.
Parents’ Occupations and Education
Parents’ occupations and education levels, because of intergenerational stickiness, have been
shown repeatedly by social mobility analyses to have a critical impact upon children’s
prospects (Motiram and Singh 2012; Heckman 2011). In the Indian context, Kumar et al.
(2002 a and b) have highlighted the critical role of what they term the salariat, comprising
salaried employees in government or private-sector offices together with self-employed
professionals and businesspeople.
Table 3 presents these data, showing how salariat fathers constitute as many as 94
percent of the total within Tier 1 business schools and engineering colleges, falling in Tier 3
civil services, but still only to 71 percent. The large numbers of salariat fathers, coupled with
the near-monotonic decline of this percentage across quality tiers, provides indication of
inter-generational reproduction of occupational class.30
-
Table 3 about here -
Note the high share of government employees among fathers, ranging from 64
percent in the Tier 1 business school to 34 percent among Tier 3 business schools. In
general, the highest share of government-employee fathers is found among those who are
themselves government employees. More than half of all entry-level civil servants across the
three tiers have fathers who are (or were) also in government service, and relatively few have
fathers employed in the private sector or with their own businesses. The children of privatesector fathers are more likely to be in business schools or in engineering colleges
Across these three occupational silos, the share of agriculturist fathers (and mothers)
is very low. According to data on occupational classifications collected in 2004-05 by the
National Sample Survey Organization, more than 55 percent of India’s working population
is categorized as cultivator or agricultural labor. Yet, only 3 percent of Tier 1 business-school
fathers are so classified, with this share rising within lower-tier business schools and
engineering colleges and among all tiers of civil services, but still nowhere more than 26
percent, less than half the population share of agriculturists. Among mothers similarly, the
share of agriculturists is very low. The rural-urban divide is critically important, as we saw
before.
Another noteworthy feature is the high share of homemaker mothers, which rises
monotonically within each occupational silo from higher- to lower-tier institutions. For
instance, among engineering colleges, the share of homemaker mothers rises from 69
percent in Tier 1 to 82 percent in Tier 3. Similarly, in the civil services category, this share
rises from 70 percent in Tier 1 to as high as 87 percent in Tier 3. Such mothers, likely to be
Further, and to some extent contrary to what Bertrand et al. (2010) found earlier in relation to engineering
students, occupational class seems to matter within caste categories as well: nearly all SC and ST students in
our sample have salariat fathers.
30
15
less educated than others, are also less likely to serve as providers to their children of soft
skills, including career-relevant information.
Not surprising, given these results, the share of college-educated fathers and mothers
is higher among Tier 1 and 2 and lower in Tier 3 institutions – across occupational silos.
Table 4 reports these numbers.
-
Table 4 about here -
A majority of business school students come from highly-educated households.
Nearly 74 percent of their fathers and more than 58 percent of their mothers have college
degrees. Among engineering college students, the corresponding proportions are also high:
71 percent and 48 percent. Among the civil services, these proportions are, respectively, 67
percent and 41 percent – once again, lower than among the corresponding proportions in
the other two occupational silos, but still higher than those prevailing amid the population at
large. Only 6.8 percent of all households in India had an adult woman with a college degree
and only 13.2 percent had a male college degree-holder, according to the India Human
Development Survey of 2004-05.
Importantly, parents’ education levels serve not only as a measure of socio-economic
status, but are related as well to other influences upon an individual’s prospects for social
mobility. In contexts such as India, where institutions providing career guidance and relevant
information are virtually non-existent, parents also serve as a critical source of diverse soft
skills. We return to this point after considering one other set of socio-economic
characteristics.
Religion, Caste and Gender
Caste is important to consider in the Indian context. On average, among all Indians, old and
young, no more than 1.4 percent of all SCs and 0.9 percent of all STs have post-graduate or
professional degrees, compared to 5.6 percent of upper-caste Hindus (Deshpande and Yadav
2006).
Religion is similarly important. Deshpande’s (2006: 2439) analysis of nationallyrepresentative data showed how Muslims, who comprise nearly 14 percent of the
population, constituted only 5.0 percent of engineering students and only 5.7 percent of
students in other college programs. A high-level committee (the Sachar Committee) which
examined the social, economic and educational status of the Muslim community found that
the disparity in graduation rates between Muslims and others, already large, had further
widened after 1970.31
In addition, the gender divide remains large. In 2004, more than twice as many men
as women in India (3.4 percent compared to 1.4 percent) had post-graduate or professional
degrees.
Does the current intake represent any improvement upon these inherited trends?
Table 5 presents the caste, religious, and gender composition of the individuals whom we
interviewed, also showing figures related to some combinations of characteristics. While the
31
See http://minorityaffairs.gov.in/sachar.
16
share of Hindus is, on average, close to the population proportion of this religious group,
the share of Muslims is overall less than half their population proportion, underlining the
conclusions of the Sachar Committee.
-
Table 5 about here -
The proportion of SCs and STs in business schools and engineering colleges is much
lower than – while in the three civil service tiers it is closer to – the proportion that these
groups make up in the national population. The reservations policy has a great deal to do
with this comparative achievement. Even among the business schools and engineering
colleges that we examined, the share of SCs and STs was higher within state-run institutions
compared to privately-managed ones. The top-tier business school and the top-tier
engineering college, both state-run, thus have higher proportions of SCs and STs compared
to their lower-tier counterparts, nearly all of which are in private hands.
The silver lining in these otherwise uninspiring results is that even these low rates of
representation are higher than historical trends. The current proportions represent a distinct
improvement, for example, upon the results reported for the late 1960s by Rajagopal and
Singh (1968), who found not a single SC or ST in the elite engineering college that they
surveyed. Similar results, giving cause for some optimism in this regard, are presented by
Deshpande and Palshikar (2008) and by Hnatkovska, Lahiri and Paul (2013).
Unfortunately, rural SCs and STs have been almost entirely unable to make it into
business schools and engineering colleges, and their share within the civil services is also low.
The combination SC (or ST) and P1 (fewer than four assets) similarly yielded tiny numbers
throughout. Not one poor ST made it to any engineering college or business school.
The greatest improvement upon historical trends has been made by women. In the
1960s, there were almost no women in elite engineering or management institutions. Partly
as a consequence, “women today comprise only two per cent of the total managerial strength
in the Indian corporate sector.”32 Similarly, in 1975, women constituted an infinitesimally
small proportion (0.68 percent) of engineering graduates, rising over the years, but still only
8.74 percent in 1988 (Parikh and Sukhatme 2004). The higher civil services have also
traditionally been a male preserve. Among all IAS officials serving at the beginning of 1985,
more than 92 percent were men.33 The substantial increase observed over these historical
trends is, therefore, heartening. As many as 17 percent of the recent intake into the Tier 1
business school, 37 percent in the Tier 1 engineering college, and 21 percent of recent
recruits into the IAS, are women,34 with an even greater representation in Tier 3 institutions.
Once again, multiple liabilities – woman and rural, woman and SC/ST, woman and
poor – raise the barrier cumulatively, making it virtually impossible for individuals to move
“Why are there so few women managers in India?” Reported on October 6, 2006 at
http://www.rediff.com/money/2006/oct/06guest.htm
33 See the report titled “Social Background of Officers in the Indian Administrative Service,” by Santosh
Goyal. Accessed on May 3, 2013 at http://isidev.nic.in/pdf/santosh1.pdf.
34 The top two positions among all candidates to a recent recruitment into the IAS went to women. See the
news report at http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-05-12/india/29535593_1_womencandidates-merit-list-preliminary-exam. Accessed on April 24, 2013.
32
17
ahead. The last row of Table 5 reports one such calculation for illustrative purposes. Being
female and poor (P1) drastically reduces an individual’s chances of making it in. In general,
women who have been making it are largely urban-educated daughters of professional
fathers and well educated mothers.
Conclusion: What should be done?
“Success,” Malcolm Gladwell (2008: 175-6) notes, “arises out the steady accumulation of
advantages: when and where you are born, what your parents did for a living, and what the
circumstances of your upbringing were, all make a significant difference in how well you do
in the world.”
In the Indian context examined above, at least four socio-economic factors act as
significant handicaps to substantial upward mobility – rural upbringing, parents employed in
agriculture or as homemakers, relative poverty, and parents’ (especially mothers’) lack of high
school and college education. Being of SC/ST origin and being a woman are other disabling
factors, but improvements over historical trends, especially in the case of women, provide
some glimmers of hope in an otherwise bleak situation, where, by and large, an urban middle
class of service sector professionals is being inter-generationally reproduced.
Why should each of these factors matter and why should their combinations be
potentially lethal to prospects for upward mobility? What can be done meaningfully to
improve the prospects of people facing one or more of these handicaps, a large share of the
Indian population?
The answers are not entirely clear; scholarship in this area is relatively recent. One
clue worth exploring further was anticipated in our earlier examination of rural origins.
In situations such as those prevailing in India, where information about career
pathways is mostly obtained by word-of-mouth, lack of achievement in the past limits the
potential for current generations, generating a vicious cycle that is hard to overcome without
external assistance. Since hardly anyone in their immediate environment has become an
engineer or MBA or IAS in the past, young people in situations of economic and social
disadvantage suffer not only because of the low quality of education that they receive; they
suffer additionally from shortage of inspiration and dearth of role models. Few school-goers
in rural areas even aspire to be engineers or MBAs. Prior surveys have revealed how the vast
majority does not even know such possibilities exist (Krishna 2010). Those who do
somehow gain the knowledge of these possibilities remain unsure of how to proceed.
Parents’ education level was revealed in the foregoing analysis as a critical issue, with
higher levels, particularly of mothers’ education, going together with entry into a higherranked institution. Parents in rural areas mostly have little or no formal education, in large
part, because when they were of school-going age rural schools simply did not exist in
sufficient numbers. Such parents are unable in most part to monitor what (if anything) their
children are learning at school. Further, they are unable to garner or impart useful
information and career advice.
Suraj Kumar, another outlier whom we interviewed in detail, explained how these
limitations operate in practice:
18
Families where the parents are less educated lack the environment necessary to prepare for
competitive exams, and people are also not aware of the opportunities that exist outside.
Such a family may not have enough faith that so many years of additional education, beyond
schooling, would result in some additional benefit or improvement in quality of life.
Such students also suffer lack of pre-established network of friends or relatives and lack of
proper information regarding the methods and means of becoming successful. For many
years I did not know what to do in future. No one in my circle dreamed big. I also faced lack
of other means of information like libraries, good television channels like Discovery,
internet, etc. Such students need teachers capable of nurturing talent. I was lucky that my
teacher in 8th class motivated me constantly. Even after I went higher [in school] he guided
me. Without his help, I would not have made it.
Inequality of opportunity is sustained in contexts where access to diverse role models
is limited. Young people in these circumstances tend to develop “a more brittle horizon of
aspirations… and a thinner, weaker sense of career pathways;” while others, who live in
cities and whose parents are educated and professionally employed, come to “have a more
complex experience of the relationship between a wide range of ends and means… a bigger
stock of available experiences” (Appadurai 2004: 68-70).
A study carried out among high achieving students from backgrounds of relative
poverty in the United States showed how even a limited amount of careful guidance and
information provision can make an important difference. Low-income students in the
treatment group who received easy-to-understand packets of information about the college
application process and about college costs were much more likely to apply for and be
accepted to selective colleges. Once they had entered into these elite colleges, the lowincome students performed as well as their better-off peers, showing how a potential exists
which needs to be activated.35 That lack of role models and poor information likely play an
even larger role in India was underlined by different parts of our survey.
Such a situation cannot be allowed to continue; the happenstance of having a wellinformed friend or well-connected relative does not compensate for lack of institutional
provision. India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, writing in 1961, stated “I have no
doubt that there is a vast reservoir of talent in this country. If only we can give it
opportunity!”36 Opportunity, however, is still not widely dispersed in India, resulting in a farfrom-optimal utilization of the talent pool about which Nehru wrote.
Institutions are required, especially in rural areas and urban slums, that can help
endow individuals with soft skills – providing career information, guidance, and motivation
and building role models for the future. More equal societies have invested in building public
institutions responsible for providing career-related information37 – including career
counseling agencies, employment exchanges, textbooks detailing diverse career paths,
interactive web sites, radio and TV links, etc.
See Hoxby and Turner (2013).
Jawaharlal Nehru, Letter to Chief Ministers, June 27, 1961, cited in Shourie (2006: x).
37 For instance, employment offices, privately-operated or government-run, function in every large and small
town in Sweden. Additional guidance and vocational training opportunities are provided at high schools and
through trade unions and the mass media.
35
36
19
Such interventions will not entirely resolve the problem; many other factors,
including poor-quality health and education, need to be addressed in parallel. However,
absent such institutional links, talented individuals will continue to face considerable
obstacles to achievement.
Helping even one or two talented and hardworking individuals from poor rural and
urban slum communities make it into places of high standing will act as a crucial stimulus,
raising the aspirations of and showing the way ahead to many others like them. Communities
who gain the confidence that their sons and daughters have a real chance of becoming
engineers and MBAs and senior government officials will shed the defeatism, the lack of
hope, that presently besets so many of them. Communities and individuals motivated in this
manner will no longer hopelessly accept absentee teachers and low-quality teaching; their
children’s futures are critically at stake. Supply-led quality improvements in education and
health have proved to be of limited potential. An alternative paradigm of development – led
from below by communities energized by new and real faith in the social mobility prospects
of their sons and daughters – is waiting to be explored.
20
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Table 1: Degrees of Rural
(Percentage of interviewees within each quality tier)
Business Schools
R1
R2
R3
R4
Tier 1
6
1
1
0
Tier 2
8
3
3
1
Engineering Colleges
Tier 3
14
11
8
3
Tier 1
15
6
5
2
Tier 2
16
10
7
1
27
Tier 3
24
11
8
2
Civil Services
Tier 1
33
12
10
7
Tier 2
48
14
11
4
Tier 3
56
32
23
12
Table 2: Relative Wealth
(Percentage of interviewees within each quality tier)
Business Schools
Average number of assets
Relative deprivation: few assets
P1 (<4 assets)
P2 (<2 assets)
Few assets and government school
P3 (P1*all govt school)
P4 (P2*all govt. school
Few assets and rural background
P5 (P2*R2)
P6 (P2*R4)
Engineering Colleges
Civil Services
Tier 1
9.2
Tier 2
10.1
Tier 3
8.6
Tier 1
8.5
Tier 2
10.5
Tier 3
8.4
Tier 1
6.2
Tier 2
5.2
Tier 3
4.1
6
2
10
8
16
12
12
2
7
3
10
4
37
15
42
16
48
25
1
0
3
2
4
1
0
0
2
1
2
2
13
8
8
2
16
5
0
0
0
0
1
1
0
0
0
0
1
0
3
0
0
0
4
2
28
Table 3: Parents’ Occupations*
(Percentage of interviewees within each quality tier)
Business Schools
Engineering Colleges
Civil Services
Tier 1
Tier 2
Tier 3
Tier 1
Tier 2
Tier 3
Tier 1
Tier 2
Tier 3
FATHERS
Own business or self-employed
Private sector service
Government service (incl. military)
Salariat**
Agriculture
13
17
64
94
3
34
12
40
86
9
37
11
34
82
17
19
18
57
94
3
32
14
38
84
9
23
15
49
87
9
11
3
63
77
15
11
11
57
79
15
10
8
53
71
26
MOTHERS
Own business or self-employed
Private sector service
Government service
Salariat**
Agriculture
Homemaker
2
7
24
33
0
65
9
5
13
27
2
70
6
5
12
23
3
73
4
12
13
29
1
69
5
6
11
22
2
73
3
3
10
16
1
82
2
2
16
20
8
70
0
2
6
8
6
84
0
0
3
3
8
87
* Column totals do not add to 100 for fathers or mothers because of some “other” and unreported occupations
** equals the sum of the preceding three categories
29
Table 4: Parents’ Education
(Percentage of interviewees within each quality tier)
Business Schools
Father<College
Mother<College
Mother<High School
Father<College and Mother<High School
Tier 1
9
25
5
1
Tier 2
18
35
8
4
Engineering Colleges
Tier 3
34
53
15
11
Tier 1
11
36
10
5
30
Tier 2
34
46
11
8
Tier 3
40
71
19
13
Civil Services
Tier 1
22
49
27
15
Tier 2
40
70
56
33
Tier 3
49
82
68
47
Table 5: Religion, Caste and Gender
(Percentage of interviewees within each quality tier)
Business Schools
Religion
Hindu
Muslim
Caste Group
SC
ST
Caste and Residence
SC*R1
ST*R1
Gender
Female
Gender and Relative Deprivation
Female*P1
Engineering Colleges
Civil Services
Census
2011
Tier 1
Tier 2
Tier 3
Tier 1
Tier 2
Tier 3
Tier 1
Tier 2
Tier 3
81%
13.5%
72
2
76
7
70
8
89
2
88
0
93
4
81
7
92
2
87
4
16%
8%
9
6
3
0
5
1
8
4
5
1
6
1
13
11
17
7
12
6
0
0
0
0
1
0
0
0
1
0
2
0
1
3
0
3
4
2
17
34
43
37
21
36
21
14
37
0
1
2
3
0
2
3
0
6
48.5%
31