Declining Enrollment of Indian Muslims in Colleges and Universities
Number of Indian Muslims attending colleges and universities has declined by 8% to 1.9 million in 2020-21, from 2.1 million in 2019-20, according to Indian government data. In the same period, the higher education enrollment in Pakistan has risen about 12%, from 2.7 million to over 3 million. Both India and Pakistan have about the same population of Muslims.
 | |
|
While enrollment of Indian Muslims has fallen by 8%, the enrollment of Dalits, Adivasis and OBCs in higher education has increased by 4.2%, 11.9% and 4% respectively compared to 2019-20. The upper caste Hindus have seen the highest jump of 13.6% in enrollment in colleges and universities.
 |
| Labor Force Education Status of Indian Muslims Worst of all Groups. Source: HT |
These results are consistent with a 2018 study by three researchers which reported that "Muslims (in India) now have considerably worse upward mobility (29) today than both Scheduled Castes (37.4–37.8) and Scheduled Tribes (32.5–32.7). The comparable figure for African Americans is 34."
The research paper titled "Intergenerational Mobility in India: Estimates from New Methods and Administrative Data" says that "higher caste groups (in India) have experienced constant and high upward mobility over time, a result that contradicts a popular notion that it is increasingly difficult for higher caste Hindus to get ahead".
Dartmouth researchers' analysis focuses on two mobility measures: (i) the expected outcome of a child born into the bottom half of the parent outcome distribution (upward interval mobility, henceforth referred to as upward mobility); and (ii) the expected outcome of a child born into the top half of the parent distribution (downward interval mobility).
 |
| Indian Muslims at Bottom in Social Mobility. Source: Dartmouth College |
Panel A in the above figure presents bounds on trends in upward interval mobility, or the average rank among sons born to fathers in the bottom half of the father education distribution. Panel B presents bounds on trends in downward interval mobility, or the average education rank among sons born to fathers in the top half of the father education distribution. Panel C presents bounds on trends in the proportion of sons completing primary school, conditional on being born to a father in the bottom half of the education distribution. Panel D presents bounds on trends in the proportion of sons attaining a high school degree, conditional on being born to a father in the bottom half of the education distribution.
The Dartmouth paper by Sam Asher, Paul Novosad and Charlie Rafkin confirms what an Indian government commission headed by Justice Rajendar Sachar found back in 2006 by saying that "Muslim disadvantage has been widely noted, including by the well-publicized federal Sachar Report (2006)". Here's an excerpt of the paper:
"India’s Muslims constitute a similar population share as the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (14% for Muslims vs. 16.6% for SCs and 14% for STs). Muslims have worse socioeconomic outcomes than the general population (Sachar Committee Report, 2006). While Muslim disadvantage has been widely noted, including by the well-publicized federal Sachar Report (2006), there are few policies in place to protect them and there has not been an effective political mobilization in their interest. Muslims have also been frequent targets of discrimination and even violence."
The discrimination and violence against Muslims that the paper refers to has only gotten worse since the election of Hindu Nationalist leader Narendra Modi to India's highest office in India in 2014.
Related Links:
Silicon Valley's Indian-American Congressman Rejects Hindutva
Silicon Valley Hindu Americans Rally in Support of Yogi, Modi
Rape of 8-year-old Asifa Bano in Kashmir
Vast Majority of Hindu Americans Support Modi
Modi's Extended Lockdown in Indian Occupied Kashmir
Hinduization of India
Brievik's Hindutva Rhetoric
Indian Textbooks
Brahmins Continue to Dominate India
Riaz Haq Youtube Channel
PakAlumni Social Network
Comments
https://thedailyguardian.com/why-are-muslims-missing-from-higher-education/
The latest edition of the All India Survey of Higher Education (AISHE), as published by the Ministry of Education, Government of India, reports that the number of Muslims in higher education declined from 21.01 Lakh in 2019-20 to 19.22 Lakh in 2020-21. Thus 1.79 Lakh Muslim students are missing from the higher education system of the country. As a result, the share of Muslim students in higher education has come down from 5.45% to 4.64% during the corresponding period.
This is when the total enrolment in higher education in India has gone up from 3.85 crore to 4.14 crore during the same period. This is also when, the enrolment of all other social groups – the Scheduled Castes (SCs), Scheduled Tribes (STs) and the Other Backward Castes (OBCs) has gone up. The only groups that have seen a decline are Persons with Disabilities, Muslims and Other Minorities.
Disquietingly, the share of Muslim students has declined across all higher educational institutions: central universities, from 8.41 to 8.24%; institutions of national importance, 1.92 to 1.87%; public-funded state universities, 5.29 to 4.30%; self-financed private universities, 4.25 to 3.87%; government deems universities, 1.10 to 1.03%; government-aided deemed universities, 14.55 to 11.84%; self-financed private deemed universities, 3.47 to 3.04%; colleges of central universities, 4.68 to 3.58%; and colleges of state universities from 6.05 to 5.09%.
What is all the more perturbing is the fact that Muslim enrolment in higher education has declined in 22 out of 36 states and Union Territories. In absolute numbers, the decline has been in UP (58,365), Jammu & Kashmir (47,334), Maharashtra (15,424), Tamil Nadu (14,593), Gujarat (10,909), Bihar (10,208), Andhra Pradesh (9,644), Jharkhand (9,263), Karnataka (6,153), Assam (5, 424), Delhi (5,271), Madhya Pradesh (2,862), Haryana (2,432), Manipur (2,049), Odisha (1,359), Rajasthan (1,193), Puducherry (785), Tripura (768), Chhattisgarh (691) and Himachal Pradesh (588), Arunachal Pradesh (57) and Meghalaya (16).
https://pib.gov.in/PressReleseDetailm.aspx?PRID=1894517
Enrollment in higher education increases to 4.14 crore (41.4 million), crossing the 4 crore mark (40 million) for first time; increase of 7.5% from 2019-20 and 21% from 2014-15
Female enrollment reaches 2 crore mark, increase of 13 Lakh from 2019-20
Significant increase of 28% in enrolment of SC students and 38% in enrolment of Female SC Students in 2020-21, compared to 2014-15.
Substantial increase of 47% in enrolment of ST students and 63.4% increase in the enrolment of Female ST Students in 2020-21, compared to 2014-15.
Significant increase of 32% in OBC Student enrolment and 39% in Female OBC Students, since 2014-15.
Notable increase of 29% in Student Enrolment and 34% in Female Student Enrolment in the North Eastern Region in 2020-21 since 2014-15.
Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) has improved from previous year for all social groups
Enrollment in Distance Education has increased by 7% in 2020-21 from 2019-20
Number of Universities has increased by 70, number of Colleges has increased by 1,453, in 2020-21 over 2019-20
Gender Parity Index (GPI) has increased from 1 in 2017-18 to 1.05 in 2020-21
Total number of faculty/teachers increases by 47,914 from 2019-20
Posted On: 29 JAN 2023 7:20PM by PIB Delhi
However the rate of growth over the last 5 years in higher education enrollment in Pakistan (12% since 2019-20, 134% since 2014-15) is much faster than in India (7.5% since 2019-20, 21% since 2014-15).
Sources: AISHI India and HEC Pakistan
https://pib.gov.in/PressReleseDetailm.aspx?PRID=1894517#:~:text=Since%202014%2D15%2C%20there%20has,1.88%20crore%20in%202019%2D20.
https://www.hec.gov.pk/english/universities/hes/Pages/HEDR-Statistics.aspx
https://qz.com/a-third-of-indias-iit-graduates-leave-the-country-1850522071
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31308/w31308.pdf
Banaras Hindu University saw a 540% spike in immigration among graduates after it was turned as an IIT in 2012
One-third of those graduating from the country’s prestigious engineering schools, particularly the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), migrate abroad.
Such highly-skilled persons account for 65% of the migrants heading to the US alone, a working paper (pdf) of the US-based National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) has concluded.
Nine out of 10 top scorers in the annual joint entrance examination held nationally for admission to the IITs and other reputed engineering colleges have migrated. Up to 36% of the top 1,000 scorers, too, have taken this path, according to the paper published this month.
In the US, there is a long list of IIT graduates now leading executives and CEOs. However, most immigrants move to the US as students and eventually join the US workforce. The NBER paper found that 83% of such immigrants pursue a Master’s degree or a doctorate.
“...through a combination of signaling and network effects, elite universities in source countries play a key role in shaping migration outcomes, both in terms of the overall propensity and the particular migration destination,” the report said.
India has 23 IITs across the country. The acceptance rates at most these hallowed institutions are lower than those of Ivy League colleges, especially at the most sought-after IITs at Kharagpur, Mumbai, Kanpur, Chennai, and Delhi. In 2023 alone, 189,744 candidates registered for the JEE, competing for only 16,598 seats.
Global economies are keen on highly skilled Indians
The US graduate program is a key pathway for migration, to recruit the “best and brightest,” the NBER report said.
Similarly, the UK’s High Potential Individual visa route lets graduates from the world’s top 50 non-UK universities, including the IITs, stay and work in the country for at least two years. For doctoral qualification, the work visa is for at least three years.
Fresh IIT graduates looking to move abroad are helped by a network of successful alumni and faculty already settled abroad, the report said. Some even provide access to particular programs where they have influence over admissions or hiring decisions.
The interesting case of Banaras Hindu University
In 2012, the century-old Banaras Hindu University (BHU), also India’s first central university, was accorded IIT status. The institute located in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, was elevated without any changes to its staff, curriculum, or admission system.
The NBER report studied 1,956 BHU students who graduated between 2005-2015 with a BTech, BPharm, MTech, or integrated dual degrees. It found a 540% increase in the probability of migration among graduates after the grant of the IIT status.
“...the quality of education/human capital acquired by the students in the cohorts before and after the change remained constant, while only the name of the university on the degree received differed,” the report said.
https://www.nafsa.org/ie-magazine/2022/4/12/indias-higher-education-landscape#:~:text=One%20metric%20of%20note%20is,achieving%2032%20percent%20by%202022.
India’s higher education landscape is a mix of progress and challenges. Its scope is vast: 1,043 universities, 42,343 colleges, and 11,779 stand-alone institutions make it one of the largest higher education sectors in the world, according to the latest (2019–20) All India Survey of Higher Education Report (AISHE 2019–20).
The number of institutions has expanded by more than 400 percent since 2001, with much of the growth taking place in the private education sector, according to a major 2019 report from the Brookings Institution, Reviving Higher Education in India. This growth continued through 2019–20, according to the 2019–20 AISHE report.
Capacity is growing rapidly to serve India’s large youth population and burgeoning college-aged cohort. One metric of note is gross enrollment ratio (GER), which measures total enrollment in education as a percentage of the eligible school-aged population. India’s GER of 27.1 percent in 2019–20 seems poised to fall below the Ministry of Education’s target of achieving 32 percent by 2022. It is also significantly behind China’s 51 percent and much of Europe and North America, where 80 percent or more of young people enroll in higher education, according to Philip Altbach, a research professor at Boston College and founding director of the Center for International Higher Education.
The number of institutions has expanded by more than 400 percent since 2001. ...Capacity is growing rapidly to serve India’s large youth population and burgeoning college-aged cohort.
India has produced many noteworthy higher education institutions, including those specializing in sciences and business, though none of them take the top spots in global rankings. Its highest-ranked institution, the Indian Institute of Science, was in the 301–350 range among institutions worldwide in 2022, according to the Times Higher Education 2022 World University Rankings. China, by contrast, has 16 institutions in the top 350, including six ranked in the top 100 and two in the top 20. However, much is different about India—its central government is less efficient and empowered, there’s enormous variation between India’s 36 states and territories, there’s less affluence, and the country has a democratic political system.
Across India, there is an enormous variation in quality institutions between states. For instance, according to the National Institutional Ranking Framework of India 2021, the best colleges in the country are concentrated in 9 of India’s 28 states: Delhi, Gujarat, Haryana, Karnataka, Kerala, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, and West Bengal. The colleges in these states are all in the ranking’s top 100 institutions, notes Eldho Mathews, deputy advisor at the National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration. In states with fewer resources, offering quality education is more of a challenge.
Other difficulties that hobble the sector include lack of sufficient funding at both the national and state levels; inefficient structure; massive bureaucracy; and corruption. An additional, formidable hurdle is to bridge the gap between graduates and jobs, as many employers have doubts about the quality of Indian graduates’ skills. In a recent survey by Wheelbox, Taggd, and the Confederation of Indian Industry, respondents rated graduates of higher education institutions below a 50 percent employability level, according to the resulting Indian Skills Report.
https://muslimmirror.com/eng/muslims-are-the-lowest-in-higher-education-says-a-report/
The recently released All India Survey on Higher Education 2020–21 says the enrollment of Muslim students dropped by 8 percent from 2019-20 – that is, by 1,79,147 students. This level of absolute decline has never happened in the recent past for any group in India. Muslims represent about 15 percent of society.
UP accounts for 36 percent of that total decline followed by Jammu and Kashmir, which accounts for 26 percent, then Maharashtra (8.5 percent), Tamil Nadu (8.1 percent), Gujarat (6.1 percent), Bihar (5.7 percent) and Karnataka (3.7 percent).
While the states that have a larger share of the Muslim population account for the higher share of decline, small states too show similar trends. For instance, between 2019-20 — 2020-21, Delhi lost about 20 percent of its Muslim students while J&K lost about 36 percent.
The Sachar Committee Report (SCR) submitted in 2006 showed that the condition of Muslims in education was comparable to, or even worse than, the country’s most backward communities. Their marginalization, since then, has deepened. Initially, Muslims were slightly above Dalits. But Dalits overtook Muslims in education in 2017-18 and in 2020-21, it was the turn of the Adivasis.
If we strictly follow the age cohort 18-23, the PLFS data confirms this trend. Muslims do even worse than Dalits and Adivasis. According to this source, only about 19 percent are currently attending higher education institutions, as against 21 percent among Adivasis, 26 percent among Dalits, 34 percent Hindu OBCs, and 45 percent Hindu upper castes.
Among major states, in 2020-21 in no state did Muslims do better than Dalits except in Tamil Nadu, Telangana, and Delhi. Advasis do better than Muslims in many states such as Rajasthan, Assam, Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Jharkhand.
UP being the most populated state pulls down the national average of Muslims. Muslims, who account for about 20 percent of the state’s population, have just 4.5 percent of total enrollment. UP alone witnessed the dropout of 58,365 Muslim students from 2019-20 — a decline of 16 percent.
If UP illustrates the story of the deepening deprivation of Muslims, Kerala offers a story of upward mobility. Kerala has not only seen positive growth in enrolment, it also tops in the percentage of Muslim youth (43 percent) who are currently attending higher education. The century-old positive discrimination in favor of Muslims has helped the community to build educational capital in the state.
Muslims in Kerala enjoy 10 percent reservation in government jobs and 12 percent in educational institutions. After Ezhavas caste (14 percent), Muslims form the largest population and also claim a large share of the quota in the state’s OBC list.
While the sources of marginalization began much before, what is new is the acceleration of such marginalization in recent times. How can this be explained? A few factors might have played a role but the key role in this context is the rising Hindu majoritarianism.
https://muslimmirror.com/eng/muslims-are-the-lowest-in-higher-education-says-a-report/
First, is the bleak employment opportunities faced by Muslims as they face the highest unemployment rate among socio-religious groups? The percentage of unemployment among Muslims rose from 1.6 percent in 2018-19 to 13.2 percent in 2019-20. This data certainly reflects discrimination against Muslims in the job market. It has been found by the surveyors that the same CV is sent with Brahmin names, Dalit names, and Muslim names, and the percentage of those invited to an interview is the lowest in the case of Muslims.
Second is the weak economic condition of the Muslim candidates and they may not have enough money for higher studies as they need to work to make a living. Hence, the high dropout rate among Muslim youth in higher education is noticed.
Third, the ongoing ghettoization process of the Muslims in almost all Indian cities has restricted their spatial mobility and has forced them to withdraw into their shells, and thus lack of interest in higher education.
Lastly, the state support for Muslims has come down sharply under the BJP rule. Karnataka which had been providing Muslims a sub-quota of 4 per cent within the OBC quota was scrapped recently by the BJP government. The Ministry of Minority Affairs has stopped the Maulana Azad Fellowship dedicated to pursuing higher education for minority students from 2022-23.
The only remedy to arrest the declining trend of Muslim enrolment in higher education is that the government should evolve a positive discrimination policy for Muslims in India. The Sachar Committee Report and the Mishra Report have recommended initiating a positive discrimination policy in favor of Muslims — something some southern states have done successfully but not the states that have a high Muslim population.
What does discrimination by targeting the Muslim population intend to achieve by targeting their access to higher education wants to achieve? Obviously, it is done with the intention to manufacture second-class citizens who cannot stand up as equals to caste Hindus. But will this policy result in the harmonious development of the country?
Rs65bn allocated to HEC in current expenditure, Rs70bn in development expenses
Pakistan Endowment Fund being created to award scholarships to school, college students on merit.
https://www.samaaenglish.tv/news/40038438
Rs65 billion are being allocated to the Higher Education Commission in the current expenditure, and Rs70 billion in the development expenditure.
A Pakistan Endowment Fund is being created for financial assistance in the education sector for which Rs5 billion have been set aside in the budget. This Fund will award scholarships to school and college students on merit.
“Our target is that no hardworking student should have to quit higher education over lack of resources,” the minister said in his speech.
Under the laptop scheme that was run successfully in Punjab in 2013-18, the federal government in the current fiscal year distributed 100,000 laptops to merit-based deserving students. To continue this scheme, Rs10 billion have been allocated in the next financial year.
Rs5 billion have been allocated for the development of professional sports, schools and colleges.
https://indianyug.com/openai-ceo-sam-altman-pretty-hopeless-for-indian-companies-to-try-and-compete-with-them/
Sam Altman, the creator of ChatGPT, expressed his belief that India’s attempt to develop a foundational AI model similar to ChatGPT may not be worth pursuing.
CEO of OpenAI and creator of ChatGPT Sam Altman was in India for the last couple of days. His visit was concentrated broadly on the way forward and regulation in the area of artificial intelligence (AI).
Meeting with the students of Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) Delhi on Thursday, June 8, 2023, for a one-on-one session with Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi, the 38-year-old techie’s emphasis was on the AI tool.
During his visit to India, Sam Altman’s one statement captured the attention of Indians, coinciding with the country’s efforts to formulate AI regulations under the Digital India Bill. The bill, which has been in progress since the previous year, signifies the timing of Altman’s visit.
Sam Altman claimed that Indians would be “totally hopeless” if they attempted to develop something akin to ChatGPT.
This observation gained widespread attention, particularly considering the challenges that tech enthusiasts often face in the country.
Altman’s remarks about the difficulty of freely expressing opinions without taking responsibility for their accuracy among Indian techies sparked a viral response on social media soon after he made them.
By Apoorvanand
Apoorvanand teaches Hindi at the University of Delhi. He writes literary and cultural criticism.
It happens only in India that even a train accident is used as an opportunity to demonise Muslims.
Just after the recent terrible train crash near Balasore station in the eastern state of Odisha, in which more than 280 people died, posts started circulating on different social media platforms and WhatsApp groups, blaming Muslims for the accident.
Could it be a coincidence that it was a Friday when three trains collided with each other in Odisha? As if the Friday angle was not sufficient, a lie was invented that the station master was Muslim. To make it look more sinister, the photo of a religious shrine near the railway track where the accident had taken place was spread on social media claiming that it was a mosque, suggesting that there must be some link between the mosque and the accident.
It was immediately exposed as a lie. It was a Hindu temple and not a mosque. But imagine if it had actually been a mosque – the baseless conspiracy theory would have received fresh wings.
Sadly, fact-checking only cements doubts created by fake news in minds that are already prejudiced against Muslims and are being told day and night that Muslims are conspiring against the nation. These are minds trained to think that there is a need to keep an eye on Muslims and to subjugate them using laws and, if necessary, violence.
The railway minister ordered an inquiry into the accident by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which has long given up the pretence of acting as an independent investigative agency and is principally used to target political opponents and probe cases along ideological lines laid down by the country’s ruling masters.
In this case, handing the case over to the CBI circumvents the normal process in such situations, which is an investigation by the commissioner of safety. The result: Instead of paying attention to flaws in safety measures, which could raise uncomfortable questions for the government, the investigation into the accident will now keep alive a criminal conspiracy theory. It aligns with the rumours spread just after the accident.
Close on the heels of this accident, the chief minister of the state of Assam, Himanta Biswa Sarma, made a speech to discourage the use of chemicals in farming. Giving it an anti-Muslim twist, he vowed that “fertiliser jihad” would not be allowed. He was using this occasion to target Bengali Muslims in his state, whose main occupation is farming. Suggesting that they were spoiling the land by using chemicals, he was giving yet another justification for evicting Bengali Muslims and taking away their land, building on a campaign he has relentlessly pursued in recent years.
Sarma is recovering from the defeat of the BJP, his party, in the legislative election for the state of Karnataka, where he was a star campaigner. He, along with other leaders of the BJP, turned the election into an anti-Muslim hate campaign, saying that he had closed hundreds of madrasas and would ensure that all are closed. He also parroted familiar tropes about Indian Muslims, portraying them as against family planning. Statistics show that rates of polygamy are almost identical among Hindus and Muslims in India, and Muslim fertility rates have fallen sharply in recent decades. But facts are inconvenient when the aim is to spread lies about a religious minority community.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-65947356
Among dropped topics are paragraphs on attempts by extreme Hindu nationalists to assassinate Mahatma Gandhi and chapters on federalism and diversity.
The NCERT has also dropped content related to the 2002 Gujarat riots; removed a chapter on Mughal rulers in India; and moved portions on the periodic table and theory of evolution in science books to higher grades, sparking criticism.
The council had said earlier that the changes, which were first announced last year as part of a syllabus "rationalisation" exercise, wouldn't affect knowledge but instead reduce the load on children after the Covid-19 pandemic.
But now some academics who were part of committees that helped design and develop the older textbooks say they don't want to be associated with the new curriculum.
On 8 June, political scientists Suhas Palshikar and Yogendra Yadav - who were advisers for political science books originally published in 2006 for classes 9 to 12 - wrote to NCERT, asking it to remove their names from the print and digital editions of the books.
The academics said they objected to the "innumerable and irrational cuts and large deletions" as they failed to see "any pedagogic rationale" behind the changes.
The NCERT issued a statement saying such a request "was out of question" because it holds the copyright of all the material it publishes. When contacted, NCERT director DS Saklani referred the BBC to the statement on its website.
The deadlock intensified last week when more than 30 academics also wrote to NCERT asking for their names to be withdrawn from the Textbook Development Committees (TDC) listed in the books. The scholars argued that possessing copyright did not entitle the NCERT to make changes to texts they wrote.
But NCERT said that the TDC's role was "limited to advising how to design and develop the textbooks or contributing to the development of their contents and not beyond this".
It also clarified that the rationalised content is applicable only for the current academic year and that a new set of textbooks will soon be developed based on fresh guidelines that adhere to the new National Education Policy.
The argument has pitted academics against each other. Critics argue that textbooks should serve as a source of introspection and accuse the NCERT of erasing portions that are not palatable to the governing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. "The decision of "rationalisation" shows either that the NCERT does not value its autonomy or its leadership does not understand its place in a democracy," Peter Ronald DeSouza, who asked for his name to be withdrawn, wrote last week.
But the NCERT has also received support. Last week, 73 academics issued a statement arguing that school textbooks were in sore need of an update.
"[The critics'] demand is that students continue to study from 17-year-old textbooks rather than updated textbooks. In their quest to further their political agenda, they are ready to endanger the future of crores [tens of millions] of children across the country," they said.
Supporters include the head of India's prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and the chief of the country's university watchdog, the University Grants Commission (UGC).
https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/muslims-in-india-the-poorest-religious-group-with-high-inequality-and-limited-opportunities-data-analysis-reveals-101688097160955.html
Muslims have the lowest asset/consumption levels among major religious groups…
An HT analysis of unit level data from the latest All India Debt and Investment Survey (AIDIS) and Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) shows that they have the lowest asset and consumption levels among major religious groups in India. Average consumption and asset values for Muslims are 87.9% and 79% of the all-India average and 87.8% and 79.3% of the average values for Hindus. Religious groups which have a population share of less than 1% have been clubbed in the “others” category.
There is often a lot of dog-whistling about the population of Muslims increasing at a higher pace than other religious groups in India. While most such commentary is ill-informed – this was discussed in detail in these pages (https://tinyurl.com/2mhjxnn2) — Muslims do have an overrepresentation problem when it comes to their relative share in population among the poor. A comparison of relative share – among every decile class by assets ; it basically measures the share in a given decile class divided by overall share in population – shows that Muslims are concentrated in the bottom half of India’s population and outnumber the Hindus in relative terms in each of the bottom six deciles.
A comparison of average asset/MPCE values across social groups among Hindus and Muslims shows this clearly. The average asset value for non-SC/ST/OBC Muslims – they are the non-Pasmanda Muslims – is not just lower than the average value for non-SC/ST/OBC Hindus but also lower than that of Hindu OBCs, which shows that the claims of Muslim upper castes enjoying disproportionate economic power are just not true.
The PLFS gives data on both the status of workers (whether regular wage, self-employed, or casual) and the type of enterprise (such as government, public and private limited companies) at which a worker is employed. This shows that even non-SC/ST/OBC Muslims have a low share in regular jobs (the average wage in such jobs is the highest) compared to other religions. A comparison with caste groups among Hindus shows that non-SC/ST/OBC Muslims only do better than ST and SC Hindus. The disadvantage for Muslims becomes even bigger if one looks at their share in government jobs, a fact which has been pointed out by the Sachar Committee among others. To be sure, the low share of Muslims among the better jobs in India need not necessarily be a result of discrimination in the hiring process. Rather, it could be the result of Muslim job-seekers lagging in terms of educational qualifications, which is bound to have a big role in employability. And sure enough, an HT analysis of PLFS data shows that the share of people with a graduate or higher degree among India’s Muslim labour force is the lowest among all major religions.
The numbers discussed in this two-part data series clearly show that while Muslims do not have a bigger intra-community inequality problem in India, they are desperately in need of overall educational and economic upliftment. While there is some merit in the claim that such aspirations are often missing in the articulation of most Muslim politicians -- a section of Muslim political leadership in India has been self-serving, conservative, even communal, one cannot but ask the question whether or not the majoritarian turn in India’s politics has relegated the economic concerns of majority of Muslims behind their concerns over identity. Even here, the poorest Muslims are the worst sufferers. To give an anecdotal example, vigilante groups forcibly shutting down meat shops on various occasions often hurt the poorest Muslims.
https://www.fairplanet.org/story/indias-discrimination-against-muslims-expands-to-housing/
Housing discrimination is not new in India as religious differences are increasingly polarised in the Hindu-majority country. When Hera Sajid moved to Mumbai from Delhi in 2017, she was not aware that such discrimination existed in the metropolitan cities. When she started looking for houses in Mumbai, she realised that her options were limited due to her faith.
“When the owner got to know that I was a Muslim, his demeanour changed. The broker turned to me asking if I was a Muslim,” Hera Sajid, a script supervisor, told FairPlanet. Later on, Hera was rejected for the same reason.
While this discrimination can look like rare incidents limited to a society or a region, it is in fact deeply systematic, according to research on the issue by Mohsin Alam Bhat, a professor from Jindal Global University Sonipat, and Asaf Ali, a researcher at the Centre for Policy Research and India Housing
Their report included more than 200 interviews with house owners, brokers, and tenants, in-depth field research in 15 neighbourhoods and housing communities in Mumbai and Delhi. In the research, they found the discrimination “systematic and writ large.”
Ali explains that in some cases, a tenant has a neutral-sounding name, but when brokers and owners find out that the tenant is a Muslim, their general response is, “Aap Musalman dikhte nahi” - “You don’t look like a Muslim.”
“In many incidents, they have been asked to vacate the house in the middle of the month without any notice just because they are Muslim,” said Ali.
SEGREGATED SPACES AND MARKETS
The everyday rise in discrimination and hate speech against Muslim minorities subsequently affects the mindset of people. “It used to happen before as well but in recent years I've seen a drastic change in owners' behaviour towards Muslim tenets,” a broker from Malviya Nagar, New Delhi, who wished to stay anonymous due to the sensitivity of the topic, told FairPlanet.
In Delhi, areas like Hauz Rani and Jamia Nagar are Muslim-majority areas and are often regarded as "mini-Pakistans." Brokers often suggest Muslim tenants to live in a “Muslim zone” where it will be easier to find housing. This splits Muslims into different clusters, making the country’s segregation saliently evident.
This kind of discrimination is rampant in cities where millions of people move every year to make a living, forcing many Muslims to live in vulnerable conditions. Sometimes tenets also agree to some unnecessary and absurd demands by the owners just to get the desired accommodations.
“When you are in need of a house, you don’t give up when these incidents happen. Muslim tenants agree to bizarre rules by owners because they are also not able to find accommodation,” explained Ali.
When some Muslims do succeed in finding a house outside Muslim-concentrated areas, their search is often fraught with struggle, frustration, humiliation and rejection.
“The fear of safety is always on their mind. Violence can break out anytime and you'll be removed from your houses,” said Asaf Ali.
“People feel a sense of security when they do find a house where the owners don't have religious prejudice, but if they don’t there is always a sense of fear,” said Nayla Khwaja.
Many tenants are asked to hide their religious identity if they wish to find a house in their desired area. Back in 2018, Sarah Khan, a researcher from Delhi, was looking for a rental flat in Mumbai. When she mentioned her full name to the broker, the broker replied, “If you wear a hijab, you will have to remove it.”
Brokers tend to want to avoid the hassle. “We understand [the discrimination] but can’t do anything about it. We do not want to lose out on business, so we try to close the deal,” one anonymous broker from Mumbai told FairPlanet.
The survey further indicates there were approximately 500,000 students enrolled in technical & vocational education, approximately 760,000 in degree-awarding colleges, and 1.96 million students in universities in 2020-21.Nov 10, 2022
https://www.trade.gov/country-commercial-guides/pakistan-education#:~:text=The%20survey%20further%20indicates%20there,in%20universities%20in%202020%2D21.
Indian American Muslim Council
@IAMCouncil
The Muslim community is less differentiated within, along class and caste lines. But they experience clear collective deprivation, write
@jaffrelotc
and Kalaiyarasan A
https://twitter.com/IAMCouncil/status/1695232087526113388?s=20
---------
BJP’s Pasmanda Muslim outreach: It’s not as divided as you think
The Muslim community is less differentiated within, along class and caste lines. But they experience clear collective deprivation
Written by Christophe Jaffrelot , Kalaiyarasan A
Updated: August 25, 2023 17:20 IST
Newsguard
https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/christophe-jaffrelot-kalaiyarasan-a-write-on-bjps-pasmanda-muslim-outreach-its-not-as-divided-as-you-think-8908162/
A couple of months ago, in his address to BJP workers in Bhopal, Prime Minister Narendra Modi emphasised that the party’s outreach to poor Muslims could take advantage of the “extreme exploitation of backward Pasmanda Muslims” by upper-caste Muslims and the parties playing the game of vote bank politics. This speech and the recent co-option of Pasmanda Muslims by the BJP have renewed the debate on caste among Muslims in India. While one cannot deny or disown the persistence of caste among Indian Muslims, in terms of socio-economic inequality, it is much less significant than among Hindus.
There are three broad groupings of Muslim castes — Ashrafs, Ajlafs and Arzals — which approximate to upper castes, OBCs and Dalits respectively. However, Dalit Muslims don’t self-identify as Scheduled Castes in survey data as they don’t enjoy reservation. Their castes are usually listed in the OBC category. OBCs constitute about 60 per cent of Indian Muslims, followed by 38 per cent of upper castes and the remaining 2 per cent constitute SC/STs. These groups, however, are unevenly distributed geographically. Pasmandas, comprising OBCs and Dalits, constitute 76 per cent of Muslims in UP and Bihar, for instance.
Drawing on the latest All India Debt and Investment Survey (AIDIS) and Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS), we use multidimensional variables — wealth consumption, access to jobs and educational attainment — to evaluate social inequalities among Indian Muslims and to compare them with the situation prevailing among Hindus.
The average per capita wealth among Hindu upper castes was Rs 8,64,984 in 2019, as against Rs 4,27,149 for OBCs, and Rs 2,28,437 for Dalits. The figures for upper-caste Muslims and OBCs were Rs 3,43,014 and Rs 3,10,922, respectively. In other words, on average, the wealth of Hindu upper castes was more than three times that of Dalits and twice that of OBCs, while this gap was just 10 per cent among Muslims. In Bihar, where Pasmanda Muslims are in large numbers, wealth inequality among Muslims is insignificant — just 2 per cent — and in Madhya Pradesh, Pasmanda Muslims do better than Ashrafs in wealth accumulation by 14 percentage points. By contrast, the gap is 43 per cent in UP, where there are remnants of landed Muslim aristocracy. However, if we compare the wealth gap among the Hindus of UP, on average, the Hindu upper castes own almost twice as much wealth as OBCs and three times as much as Dalits.
A similar trend can be observed in consumption, too. In 2021-22, the average per capita monthly expenditure among the Muslim upper castes was Rs 2,180, as against Rs 2,151 among Pasmandas, a margin of 1.4 per cent. The corresponding figures for Hindus were quite different: Upper castes, with Rs 3,321, consumed 40 per cent more than OBCs (Rs 2,180) and 57 per cent more than Dalits (Rs 2,122). The gap among Muslims was rather small in UP (6.2 per cent) and Bihar (10 per cent), while it stood at, respectively, 48 per cent for the Hindu upper castes vis-Ã -vis OBCs and 60 per cent vis-Ã -vis Dalits in UP, and 27 per cent and 48 per cent in Bihar.
by Christophe Jaffrelot
https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/christophe-jaffrelot-kalaiyarasan-a-write-on-bjps-pasmanda-muslim-outreach-its-not-as-divided-as-you-think-8908162/
In terms of educational attainment too, Ashrafs and Pasmandas are not so different. In 2021-22, the percentage of upper caste Muslim youth (18 to 23 years) attending higher educational institutions was the same as the Pasmandas: 19.8 per cent. By contrast, the percentage of Hindu youth in higher education among upper castes was as high as 46.5 per cent, while it was 36 per cent for OBCs and 26 per cent for Dalits. Interestingly, in UP and Madhya Pradesh, Pasmandas do even better than their upper-caste counterparts. In fact, in UP, Muslim upper castes are experiencing negative growth in educational attendance. As a result, their enrollment came down to 12 per cent in 2021-22, as against 14 per cent in 2011-12 — an unprecedented development in the history of India so far as we know, simply because every group, so far, has experienced greater access to higher education.
Muslims’ lower access to education gets reflected in access to regular jobs. The percentage of salaried workers among Muslims is 19.3 per cent as against 21.5 per cent for Hindus. But, again, there is no difference between Muslim upper castes and Pasmandas. In contrast, the percentage of salaried workers among Hindu upper castes is 33 per cent as against 19.9 per cent for Hindu OBCs and 21.5 per cent for Dalits. In states such as UP, Bihar, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, Pasmanda Muslims do better than their upper-caste counterparts, whereas Hindu upper castes still control most of the coveted jobs.
In sum, Muslims are less differentiated along class and caste lines than Hindus: While Hindus form an extremely unequal community, with upper castes being very resilient net gainers, Muslims are experiencing collective deprivation. That said, BJP leaders may still “divide and rule” Muslims by co-opting Pasmandas — the way they have done with Shias and Bohras — as well as by exploiting status-related faultlines, which remain strong even if class-based distinctions are much less visible than on the Hindu side. In UP, during the recent local body elections, the BJP nominated 395 Muslim candidates and 61 won. Three-fourths of these 395 candidates were Pasmandas. By contrast, in the previous local elections, the party had fielded only 180 Muslim candidates, with only one winning.
By
Abhishek Jha
,
Roshan Kishore
Jun 30, 2023 09:22 AM IST
An HT analysis of unit level data from the latest AIDIS and PLFS shows they have the lowest asset and consumption levels among major religious groups in India
https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/muslims-in-india-the-poorest-religious-group-with-high-inequality-and-limited-opportunities-data-analysis-reveals-101688097160955.html
An HT analysis of unit level data from the latest AIDIS and PLFS shows they have the lowest asset and consumption levels among major religious groups in India
The first of this two-part data series looked at intra-religious inequality among Muslims and found that they are as unequal a society as Hindus in India. These measures of inequality do not tell us about the material well-being (or lack of it) of Muslims as a whole vis–a-vis other religious groups in India. An analysis of the relevant numbers shows that they are the poorest religious group in the country. Here are four charts which explain this in detail.
Muslims have the lowest asset/consumption levels among major religious groups…
An HT analysis of unit level data from the latest All India Debt and Investment Survey (AIDIS) and Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) shows that they have the lowest asset and consumption levels among major religious groups in India. Average consumption and asset values for Muslims are 87.9% and 79% of the all-India average and 87.8% and 79.3% of the average values for Hindus. Religious groups which have a population share of less than 1% have been clubbed in the “others” category.
Which means that they over-populate the ranks of the poor in India
There is often a lot of dog-whistling about the population of Muslims increasing at a higher pace than other religious groups in India. While most such commentary is ill-informed – this was discussed in detail in these pages (https://tinyurl.com/2mhjxnn2) — Muslims do have an overrepresentation problem when it comes to their relative share in population among the poor. A comparison of relative share – among every decile class by assets ; it basically measures the share in a given decile class divided by overall share in population – shows that Muslims are concentrated in the bottom half of India’s population and outnumber the Hindus in relative terms in each of the bottom six deciles.
Even Muslim upper castes are poorer than Hindu OBCs
A comparison of average asset/MPCE values across social groups among Hindus and Muslims shows this clearly. The average asset value for non-SC/ST/OBC Muslims – they are the non-Pasmanda Muslims – is not just lower than the average value for non-SC/ST/OBC Hindus but also lower than that of Hindu OBCs, which shows that the claims of Muslim upper castes enjoying disproportionate economic power are just not true.
Poor employment and educational opportunities seem to be the primary cause of economic backwardness for Muslims
The PLFS gives data on both the status of workers (whether regular wage, self-employed, or casual) and the type of enterprise (such as government, public and private limited companies) at which a worker is employed. This shows that even non-SC/ST/OBC Muslims have a low share in regular jobs (the average wage in such jobs is the highest) compared to other religions. A comparison with caste groups among Hindus shows that non-SC/ST/OBC Muslims only do better than ST and SC Hindus. The disadvantage for Muslims becomes even bigger if one looks at their share in government jobs, a fact which has been pointed out by the Sachar Committee among others. To be sure, the low share of Muslims among the better jobs in India need not necessarily be a result of discrimination in the hiring process. Rather, it could be the result of Muslim job-seekers lagging in terms of educational qualifications, which is bound to have a big role in employability.