Spatial and Social Inequalities in Human Development: India in the ...

percentage of households not having safe drinking water facility (Table 8) and toilet (Table 9)within the premise is much less than that of households not having electricity. Furthermore, theinterstate inequality has gone up significantly in case of both water as well as sanitationfacilities. It is a matter of anxiety that the level of income of the states determine the access totoilet facilities and safe drinking water, the correlations being 0.72 and 0.43 respectively. Thisshould be a matter of serious concern since not having access to these basic amenities in theeconomically backward states would have a direct bearing on the health status of the familymembers, particularly the infant mortality rates.4. Inequalities and Inequality across Social, Religious and Gender GroupsConsumption ExpenditureThe discussion on the growth scenario will be incomplete without considering the fact that thebenefits do not accrue uniformly also across socio-religious categories. The historicallyunderprivileged scheduled caste and scheduled tribe population are often noted as recordingslower improvement over time in multiple economic and social dimensions. The sharpening ofinequalities across the states, as discussed above, would also affect these socio-economicgroups differently. Furthermore, the deprivation of Muslims and discrimination against them inlabour market and certain social spheres is also a matter of serious policy concern. The PrimeMinister’s High Level Committee (Sachar Committee 2006), probing into this aspect has shownthat the gaps in economic wellbeing between Muslims and the average population are veryhigh, more so in case of urban areas and women than for rural areas and men. Variousprograms of the government including that of the Reserve Bank of India under the PrimeMinister’s 15-point programme have not made much impact on their conditions.Given the differential access to labour and capital market of different castes and communities,an attempt is made here to analyse the trends and pattern per capita consumption expenditure- a summary measure of economic wellbeing - to assess the magnitude inter group inequality inthe country. Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and Buddhists are India’s prominent minoritycommunities, accounting for 140 million or about 18 per cent of the country’s billion-pluspopulation. Muslims constitute about 75 per cent of this minority population. Following theclassification system adopted by the Sachar Committee, Hindus have been placed in 3categories – SCs, STs and Others for the analysis in this section. However, for comparability withother sections, figures for total SCs and STs have also been computed. Other religious groups(ORG) include all non Hindu religious groups except Muslims but include non-Hindu SC & STpopulation that are very small. The people in the first five categories thus add up to the totalpopulation with no overlap between any two categories.26