Wage and Occupational Discrimination against Untouchables

Abstract

Abstract9.1This chapter addresses the discrimination faced by the scheduled castes in wage earning in the public and private sector. It estimated the earning functions by social groups across the entire wage distribution using quantile regression and also analyses the changes in the contribution of individual characteristics over time. Empirical results indicate that the wage gap between scheduled castes and higher castes is high at a lower level of distribution than at the upper level in public sector and the opposite for private sector. The chapter also estimates the impact of occupation segregation on wage earning between the scheduled castes and higher castes by decomposing the discrimination component further into wage discrimination and job discrimination component, using expanded decomposition method.