Why Social Equity?

Current thinking about development places people firmly at the centre of concern, the basic building block for analysis and policy. This is as true of the innovations led by Amartya Sen and followed by UNDP and many others, which moved away from a focus purely on material/commodity to incorporate wider perspectives on human development. Issue of assessing and targeting group inequality (i.e. poor who are they, where they live and how they live etc.)  in this context, serve as effective policy option for following  instrumental reasons.

First reason is as I mentioned in the introduction that the original concept of human development refers to people’s achievement in different spheres of their life, the general level of analysis (such as  geographical or administrative units such as state/regions or the districts level analysis) does not directly reveals development achievements and its variation among population. Certainly, it would be more rational to treat disparity as the variation among social groups rather than over the general or aggregate terms. In this context, the disparity in achievements such as disparity between caste groups (notably between Scheduled Castes/Tribes and Other Castes) disparity between different religions (such as Hindus, Muslims, Christians etc) and gender (disparity between male and female) are examples of more meaningful groupings from social analytical point of view. Such analysis is not only necessary to address the issue of inter-social group variation in development outcomes, which in turn is a valuable input for policy makers and governments to target and allocate resources. But, it will make the description more relevant to the address social justice and equity issues.

Secondly, being concerned with group well-being, i.e. for social equality, which is self-evidently important in itself, and also generally as a precondition of human development. (Sen 2002 Stewart 2001). The impact of group inequalities on social stability will be elaborated as: If group inequality persists, then individuals within the depressed group may be handicapped and therefore not make the contribution to their own and society’s prosperity that they might have. For example, if the dalit has systematically less access to education than other, children within that group will not acquire the human resources that others of equal merit do, and not only the individuals but also society will suffer. Such inequalities may be due to the unequal distribution of public goods. This occurs, for example, where physical infrastructure is unequally distributed across areas, and communities are clustered in these areas. Therefore, policies that simply addressed deprived individuals or poor may therefore fail unless accompanied by policies directed towards group inequalities.

Another type of instrumental reason is that taking action to correct group inequalities may be the most efficient way of achieving other objectives (i.e. poverty reduction or social justice).  This occurs where differential outcomes are closely identified with group characteristics. For example, poverty incidence in is closely correlated with a particular region, and a particular caste/ethnic group, for example, the most of the poor lives in BIMARU states and the SCs/STs whom constitute about 56% of ’s poor.  The most efficient way to achieve the objective of reducing poverty in is through policies targeting at a particular groups or regions. The neglect of the group as a classificatory device can therefore reduce the effectiveness of policies which in themselves are not grouped based.

There are direct welfare impacts of group inequalities. What happens to the group to which an individual belongs may affect that individual’s welfare directly, i.e. individual welfare depends not just on a person’s own circumstances but the prestige and well being of the group with which they identify. For this reason, Akerlof and Kranton have included a person’s identity in the individual’s utility function arguing that ‘ a person assigned a category with a higher social status may enjoy an enhanced self-image’. (Akerlof and Kranton 2000 , p719). One reasons for this arises where other groups taunt members of a particular group, causing serious violence. This is what happening atrocity on dalits in .Limited mobility between groups enhances each of these effects. If people can readily move between groups, then groups matter much less both instrumentally and for their direct impact on welfare, since if the effects of group membership are adverse, people can shift; and groups also become ineffective targeting devices since people can readily move into any group to which benefits are targeted thereby causing targeting errors. The policy targeting is important if the groups, whose boundaries are fairly well defined and limited where HIs matter.

Moreover, as a caste economy and characterized by essential features of economic organization of the caste system is the unequal and hierarchal ordering of castes in term of economic rights. The manner in which the caste based customary rules related to right to property or occupation, were devised, the caste located at the top of the caste order, namely the Brahmin have overwhelming rights and the untouchable (dalits) who are placed at the bottom of the caste hierarchy had no choice except to serve the high caste as labour. Thus the unique economic features of the system continuing relevance and should be important tool or policy modeling to address social equity, poverty reduction and justice. These are substantial reasons for assessing and targeting group well-being is important policy option to reduction of group inequalities to be an important societal objective of poverty reduction, equality and social justice.