Residential segregation and public services in urban India

Abstract

Urban India is characterised by a high degree of intra-city spatial inequality in the availability of public services like piped water and sewerage. We unpack the political channels that link residential segregation with access to public services. ‘Micro-segregation’, or neighbourhood residential sorting within a ward (the elementary administrative and political unit in urban India), enables segregated neighbourhoods to better organise and petition public services. Political competition further amplifies these demands from segregated neighbourhoods. The state’s response to such demand is, however, modulated by both in-group favouritism and outgroup discrimination. States’ ability to indulge in such favouritism and discrimination is in turn contingent on how the caste composition of a ward is different from that of the city as a whole –‘macro-segregation’. We combine large-scale quantitative analysis using neighbourhood-level national census data for all towns in India with at least 0.3 million residents, and multi-year qualitative fieldwork in Bengaluru, a metropolis of over 10 million residents, to delineate the interactions between these demand-side and supply-side channels. While macro-segregation is negatively associated with piped water and sewerage, micro-segregation has a positive association.