Caste and the Urban Labour Market: How Caste Shapes Job Opportunities in Indian Cities

Move to any Indian city and you’ll hear the same promise: shed your caste, chase merit, and the market will reward you fairly. Cities are supposed to dissolve old hierarchies that rural India still carries. But look closely at who cleans, who codes, who owns the shop, and who works in it – and a different pattern emerges. Caste hasn’t disappeared from the urban labour market. It has simply learned new disguises.

The informal economy still runs on caste lines 🔗

Urban labour markets are supposed to be caste-blind. In theory, anyone who works hard and has the right skills can move up. Sociologist Surinder Jodhka’s research complicates this picture. His fieldwork among Dalit entrepreneurs in Haryana and Uttar Pradesh found that even when they leave villages and set up businesses in towns, they struggle to move beyond the informal margins of the urban economy, competing against established caste and kinship networks that guard their share of the market.

This isn’t just anecdotal. The World Bank’s 2011 report on poverty and social exclusion in India documented how Scheduled Caste (SC) workers remain concentrated in insecure, low-paying work, while landlessness and a lack of social networks keep them out of self-employment and better-paid regular jobs. The wage gap between Dalits and other groups was found to be even wider in salaried employment than in casual daily-wage work, meaning the more “formal” the job gets, the more caste seems to matter.

Formal government jobs, same old hierarchy 🔗

Government employment is often held up as the great equaliser for Dalits, thanks to constitutional reservation. And it’s true that SC representation in public sector jobs is higher than in the private sector. But the type of job matters as much as the sector. SC employees are heavily clustered in the lowest rungs – safai karamcharis, peons, and sanitation staff – rather than in managerial or officer-level roles.

The numbers on sanitation work are stark. Across the subcontinent, an estimated 98 percent of India’s safai karamcharis are Dalit, a direct continuation of the idea that only certain castes should handle “polluting” work. Government profiling data under a recent national sanitation-worker scheme found that close to 69 percent of sewer and septic tank workers belonged to Scheduled Castes, with the combined SC, ST, and OBC share touching 92 percent. So even inside the “secure” government job, caste hasn’t gone anywhere – it has just been reorganised by designation. The office may be modern, air-conditioned, and urban, but the person mopping its floor is very often still doing so because of where they were born, not what they studied.

Private sector jobs and the weight of cultural capital 🔗

The private sector likes to present itself as the opposite of this – a meritocracy where skill and hustle beat birth. Reality is more layered. Broadly, urban private employment splits into two kinds of firms: family-owned businesses, where top positions are reserved for relatives regardless of ability, and newer companies or start-ups that claim to hire strictly on merit.

It’s this second category where the caste story gets interesting, because discrimination there is rarely announced – it’s built into the interview itself. Researchers Jodhka and Newman interviewed HR managers at large firms and found that “fit” was judged not just on qualifications but on a candidate’s family background, and even the way they speak English. One hiring manager admitted it plainly: caste and social background become obvious the moment a candidate opens their mouth. Another study built on this work found the same pattern – companies believe they are screening for merit and “cultural fit,” while actually favouring soft skills that only a privileged upbringing can provide, which first-generation, often lower-caste, graduates simply haven’t had the chance to acquire.

Why family-run firms and “meritocratic” start-ups aren’t so different 🔗

In family businesses, the caste and class bias is upfront – top posts go to relatives, full stop. In supposedly merit-driven firms, it’s dressed up as professionalism: the right accent, the right dress sense, the right comfort in a boardroom. Analysts of caste and class in hiring note that interview settings quietly demand formal clothes, polished shoes, and fluent English – expectations that many first-generation job seekers from Bahujan communities simply cannot meet, not because they lack ability, but because they lack the exposure that comes with generational privilege. This is a textbook case of what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called cultural capital – the knowledge, mannerisms, and confidence absorbed at home, in school, and through family networks, which then gets mistaken for individual “merit” in a job interview.

Social capital and uneven paths to economic mobility 🔗

Beyond hiring, there’s the question of who gets ahead once they’re working – or who manages to start their own venture. Social capital, the networks of trust and mutual help that grease every economy, is still largely organised along caste lines even in cities. If your caste community doesn’t have people already established in business, banking, or a particular trade, you start several steps behind.

This shows up sharply in access to credit. Jodhka’s survey of Dalit entrepreneurs running small businesses in Panipat (Haryana) and Saharanpur (Uttar Pradesh) found that Scheduled Caste owners represented only around 7 percent of urban private enterprises despite making up roughly 12 percent of the urban population, a gap explained largely by their limited access to formal credit, collateral, and established supplier or buyer networks. Later work following the same communities confirmed that kinship and caste-based networks still act as gatekeepers for mobilising capital through banks, since historically deprived communities rarely own the land or property that lenders demand as collateral. In effect, the same social capital that helps upper-caste entrepreneurs raise a business loan on a handshake becomes an invisible wall for Dalit entrepreneurs trying to do the same thing.

Not all Dalits alike: Chamars versus Balmikis in urban business 🔗

One of the more revealing findings from this research is that caste disadvantage isn’t evenly spread even within Dalit communities. Traditional occupational skills, it turns out, can translate into urban business opportunity – or fail to, depending on the trade.

Chamars, whose traditional occupation involved leather work, have been comparatively more successful at building urban enterprises around leather goods, footwear, and related trades, since they carry an inherited skill set and existing supply-chain knowledge into the city. Balmikis, traditionally associated with sanitation work, have found it far harder to convert their traditional occupation into an independent urban business, since there’s little market demand for an enterprise built around manual cleaning work outside of employment by a municipal body or contractor. Jodhka’s fieldwork found this pattern consistently across his interviews with Dalit business owners, reflecting how deeply occupational legacies shape who can move from wage labour into self-employment, and who remains stuck. The lesson here is important: “Dalit” is not one uniform economic category. Intra-Dalit hierarchies, shaped by what caste groups historically did for a living, continue to decide who gets a shot at urban entrepreneurship and who doesn’t.

What this means for how we understand urban India 🔗

Put together, these patterns tell a consistent story. Cities don’t erase caste – they redistribute it. Informal work absorbs a disproportionate share of lower-caste labour. Formal government jobs keep Dalits concentrated at the bottom rung even while offering job security. Private firms replace overt discrimination with the softer, harder-to-prove language of “fit” and “communication skills.” And even entrepreneurship, the one path meant to reward individual initiative over inherited privilege, runs into the same wall of unequal access to credit and networks – a wall that’s higher or lower depending on which caste, and which traditional occupation, you were born into.

What do you think? If cultural capital and social networks matter as much as formal qualifications in urban hiring, what would a genuinely merit-based hiring process actually look like? And do you think entrepreneurship support schemes in Indian cities do enough to account for these unequal starting points, or do they assume a level playing field that doesn’t exist?

References

1. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09722661251346574
2. https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/744491468267021755/txt/613140PUB0v20P00Box379790B00PUBLIC0.txt
3. https://www.nybooks.com/online/2023/08/24/the-long-struggle-of-indias-sanitation-workers/
4. https://www.thenewsminute.com/news/77-of-manual-scavengers-are-dalit-says-report-despite-union-govts-denial
5. https://en.themooknayak.com/india/the-modern-purity-test-jnus-prof-illustrates-how-casteism-prevails-in-corporate-indias-hiring-halls
6. https://laviedesidees.fr/Why-Hasn-t-Caste-Disappeared-Yet
7. https://feminisminindia.com/2017/03/22/caste-bias-private-sector/
8. https://idsn.org/wp-content/uploads/user_folder/pdf/New_files/India/IIDS_-_Dalits_in_Business.pdf