The Price of Birth: The Indian Caste System and its Implications for the Contemporary Indian Labour Market

Through this thesis, I look at how the historical and contemporary Indian caste system continues to shape labour market inequality despite formal equality being granted by the Indian Constitution and decades of affirmative action. I try to explore how caste continues to perpetuate inequality in employment, wages, social status, occupational mobility, and representation, while also examining to what extent reservation policies have translated into real improvement for the Indian Dalit population. The central argument is that caste remains an active structure of labour allocation and exclusion rather than merely a residual social or historical identity. Through my analysis, I combine literature from economics, sociology, and political science, as well as quantitative labour market studies and qualitative interview evidence. The findings from the research show how Dalits remain disproportionately concentrated in informal and lower-paid forms of work, while upper-caste groups have much stronger representation in salaried and higher-status jobs. The research, further, shows that reservations have provided crucial gains in the public education and employment sectors, but these effects remain limited. The main argument of the thesis is that, because formal equality has not been directly translated into substantive equality, caste continues to function through stigma, exclusionary networks, labour devaluation, and unequal institutional treatment. My conclusion from this research is that reservations remain necessary yet insufficient, and that substantive equality would require better access to education, employment, institutions, and social opportunities.