Residential Segregation in an Urbanizing India

This seminar will show how residential caste-segregation is independent of city size, using the first ever large-scale evidence of neighborhood-resolution data from 1,235 of the largest cities in contemporary India. Bharathi will discuss one of the central conundrums in Indian urbanism — the persistence of caste segregation across the country, and across cities of varying sizes. This finding punctures a hole in one of the central normative promises of India’s urbanization: the gradual withering of traditional caste-based segregation. This seminar will provide further fine-grained evidence on the ghettoization of the most spatially marginalized groups in urban India: Muslims and Dalits.