Large and persistent life expectancy disparities among India’s social groups

Aashish Gupta and Nikkil Sudharsanan

No hu8t9, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: India has one of the most rigid systems of social stratification in the world, yet little is known about how this system has shaped life expectancy in the country. We provide the first direct estimates of caste and tribe differences in life expectancy in India using survey data spanning two decades. We find that individuals from the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes have drastically lower life expectancies than high-caste individuals (between 4.2-4.4 years for women and 6.1-7.0 years for men in 2013-2016.). These disparities have persisted over a 20-year period. Importantly, mortality disparities are present across the entire life-course and increasingly driven by older age mortality. Our findings reveal a pressing need for far greater examination of the health of marginalized populations in India.

Date: 2020-09-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age and nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://osf.io/download/5f58804e4f1e5e01ea6f5cca/

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:socarx:hu8t9

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/hu8t9

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SocArXiv from Center for Open Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by OSF ().