Search

'Social distance,' and 'social distancing' have become the linguae francae of our world ravaged by COVID-19. Pandemic related social distancing prescriptions, however, do not operate in a vacuum. How do social distancing strategies for containing the pandemic intersect with extant social divisions? Using a unique census-scale micro-dataset from rural Karnataka (an Indian state as large as France), we meditate on this question by drawing on theoretical insights from multiple disciplines including the intellectual genealogy of 'social distance' as a measure of social divisions. Our rich dataset contains independent India's first census-scale enumeration (n ≈ 36.5 million) and coding of elementary caste categories (≈700 jatis). Our dataset is also the first to combine self-reported jati and religion information. To the best of our knowledge, we present the first systematic large-n portrait of intra-village residential segregation in rural India. Our micro-segregation analysis along jati and religion axes provides evidence for a 'permanent cordon sanitaire.' Our analysis also sheds light on how the pandemic intersects with internal migration trajectories in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a comprehensive multi-scale test of the diversity-deficit hypothesis that posits a negative association between diversity and development. We develop a 'scale-flip hypothesis' that formalises how the political salience of diversity is contingent on the level of analysis. We also contribute to the political economy of public goods literature using the largest dataset used to date – n ≈ 1.2 million village-year points from a two-period panel of all villages in the Indian national census data. We find evidence for 'scale-flip' so that there is a robust positive association between diversity and public goods at the local level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]