IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/isbchp/978-981-10-6274-2_5.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Can Horizontal Inequalities Explain Ethnic Conflicts? A Case Study of Bodoland Territorial Area Districts of Assam

In: Inequality, Poverty and Development in India

Author

Listed:
  • Rupan Boro

    (IIT Guwahati)

  • Rajshree Bedamatta

    (IIT Guwahati)

Abstract

Inequalities play a major role in political and ethnic conflicts in different regions of the world. However economic literature has largely focused on vertical inequalities, i.e. inequalities among individuals as opposed to groups of people. In the recent times the focus has shifted to the role of horizontal inequalities, which refer to inequalities between groups of people sharing common identity such as race, ethnicity, language, religion or region (Stewart 2000). Therefore, they are multifaceted and include various dimensions (for, e.g. socio-economic, political and cultural status). This chapter refers to the recent Bodo-Muslim conflict in the Bodoland Territorial Area Districts of Assam (BTAD) in 2012. We measure economic horizontal inequalities (EHIs) classifying population of BTAD into STs, SCs, OBC, other/general and Muslims using population weighted group Gini index (GGini). NSSO unit level data of 61st and 66th Consumer-Expenditure rounds have been used for calculations. We find that there are significant spatial and horizontal economic inequalities in the BTAD districts compared to the other districts of Assam. Among the social groups, Muslims are found to be the poorest while SCs are better off followed by the STs (mostly Bodos). In Assam as a whole, the extent of land owned by the ST households is found to be the highest while it is lowest among the Muslims. In sharp contrast, land ownership among Muslims is comparatively higher than the other groups (including the dominant Bodo group) in BTAD.

Suggested Citation

  • Rupan Boro & Rajshree Bedamatta, 2017. "Can Horizontal Inequalities Explain Ethnic Conflicts? A Case Study of Bodoland Territorial Area Districts of Assam," India Studies in Business and Economics, in: Utpal Kumar De & Manoranjan Pal & Premananda Bharati (ed.), Inequality, Poverty and Development in India, chapter 0, pages 97-125, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:isbchp:978-981-10-6274-2_5
    DOI: 10.1007/978-981-10-6274-2_5
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:isbchp:978-981-10-6274-2_5. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.