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The fact that many Indian rural dwellings lack toilets and that, therefore, a significant proportion of India’s rural population is forced to defecate in the open has, by facilitating the spread of bacterial infections, profound consequences for public health. Compounding this is the fact that open defecation means that people carry limited amounts of water with them and so, by default, post-defecation handwashing is cursory. This paper, using data from the Indian Human Development Survey, examines the demand for toilets in India and the quality of post-defecation personal hygiene. Income, education, and ancillary facilities in the dwelling—like kitchens, and proper roofs and floors—were the strongest influences on demand. However, ceteris paribus households in more developed villages were more likely to have a toilet than those in less developed villages. This suggests that, over and above specific factors, households’ toilet demand also depended on their social environment In setting out these results, the paper rejects the idea, put forward in several academic papers, that the problem of open defecation in India exists because considerations caste and ritual pollution lead rural Indians to prefer open defecation to toilet use.

Using data from the World Values Survey, this book sheds light on the link between happiness and the social group to which one belongs. The work is based on a rigorous statistical analysis of differences in the probability of happiness and life satisfaction between the predominant social group and subordinate groups. The cases of India and South Africa receive deep attention in dedicated chapters on cast and race, with other chapters considering issues such as cultural bias, religion, patriarchy, and gender. An additional chapter offers a global perspective. On top of this, the longitudinal nature of the data facilitates an examination of how world happiness has evolved between 1994 and 2014. This book will be a valuable reference for advanced students, scholars and policymakers involved in development economics, well-being, development geography, and sociology.

This study has two purposes; the first is to test differences between dominant and subordinate groups in India and South Africa. For India, the comparison is between caste groups: the dominant “forward castes” and the subordinate “non-forward castes”. For South Africa, the comparison is between racial groups: whites as a dominant group and non-Whites (Blacks, Coloured, and Asians) as a subordinate group. The second purpose of the study is to compare happiness levels between India and South Africa with a view to rigorously establishing where happiness is greatest and what its drivers are. These issues are examined using data from the World Values Survey (WVS). Covering in excess of 250,000 respondents drawn from 90 countries, and available for the period 1994–2014, WVS remains the most widely accessible database on well-being. This study establishes that, in general, Indians were happier than South Africans in this period, meaning that the predicted probability of being happy was, on average, higher in India (84.2%) than in South Africa (81.1%). Another important finding was that persons from the dominant groups were more likely to be happy in South Africa than in India but that persons from the subordinate groups were more likely to be happy in India than in South Africa.

This paper’s theme is about opportunities in cricket—offered and denied. It discusses opportunities offered systemically to members of certain groups and denied to those who belong to other groups. In India, this takes the form of a person’s caste to which a person is born; in England, the type of school that one attended is relevant; and in South Africa, skin colour plays an important role in determining one’s chances of playing representative cricket. It is very easy to underestimate the importance of opportunities in sculpting sporting success by, instead, ascribing success to a sportsperson’s talent and natural gifts.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide a quantitative assessment of caste-based conflict in India. The data for this paper are from the Rural Economic and Demographic Survey (REDS) of 2006 encompassing 8,659 households in 242 villages in 18 Indian states. Design/methodology/approach Using these data, the authors examine two broad issues: the sources of conflict in rural India and the degree to which these sources contribute to caste-basted, as opposed to non-caste-based conflict; the sources of conflict resolution in rural India: are some conflict-resolving agencies more effective at dealing with caste-based conflicts and others more effective with non-caste-based conflicts? Findings There was a rise in caste-based conflict over the (approximate) period 1996-2006. There are several reasons for the rise in caste-based conflict but, in the main, is the rise in assertiveness of persons belonging to India’s lower castes. In terms of conflict resolution, panchayats and prominent individuals were important in resolving village conflicts: 69 per cent of caste-based, and 65 per cent of non-caste based, conflicts were resolved by one or the other of these two agents. Originality/value This is the first attempt, using econometric methodology, to study caste conflict at a village level in India.

[...]poor hygiene, particularly the failure of mothers to wash hands after defecation, is a prime cause of diarrhoea in children in developing countries (Borooah 2004; Huang and Zhou 2007; Ejemot-Nwadiaro et al 2015). Open defecation in India has attracted a great deal of academic interest, and its eventual elimination, through a programme of building toilets, has been an important object of successive Indian governments—from the Total Sanitation Campaign and the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan to the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan.1 An important and influential line in academic thinking, as articulated in Coffey and Spears (2017); Coffey et al (2017: 59), is that widespread open defecation in rural India is not attributable to relative material or educational deprivation but rather to beliefs, values, and norms about purity, pollution, caste and untouchability … that cause people to consider having and using a pit latrine as ritually impure and polluting … By contrast, 96.6% of households in metropolitan areas and 83.5% of households in non-metropolitan urban areas had a toilet within their homes, and so, the analysis of the prevalence of toilets within the household dwelling reported in this paper is restricted to rural households.5 Of rural households, the “other” social group—comprising Christians, Sikhs, and Jains—were most likely to have a toilet (and also amenities like a separate kitchen, water supply within their dwellings, and pucca roofs and floors), while the Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs) were least likely to have a toilet (only 27.2% of SC and 26.5% of ST households had a toilet) and other ancillary amenities. Only 30% of households that had a toilet did not have a separate kitchen or a pucca roof, and one-third of households that had a toilet did not have a pucca floor. [...]most households that could not afford a toilet also could not afford ancillary amenities like a separate kitchen or a pucca roof or floor, and only a minority of households that had a toilet did not have ancillary amenities like a separate kitchen or a pucca roof or floor.

There has been little investigation into whether the \"social gradient to health\"—whereby people belonging to groups higher up the social ladder have better health outcomes than those belonging to groups further down—exists in developing countries like India. The relative strengths of economic and social status in determining the health status of persons in India is evaluated using the National Sample Survey Office data set for 2004 and 2014. This is evaluated with respect to two health outcomes: the age at death and the self-assessed health status of elderly persons.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book covers a diversity of issues using the technical apparatus of economics to rigorously interrogate the relevant data. It examines the issue of whether women are more prone to depression and anxiety than men and, conversely, if men are more susceptible to anger issues than women and, again, by how much. The book addresses gender issues but this time through the lens of the debilitating effects of domestic violence, both emotional and physical, on the happiness of married women. It deals with an issue that is of relevance to both the US and the UK, namely, the treatment of persons from Black – for the UK, the term most used is Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic – groups in respect of police stop-and-search activities. The book also addresses an issue that is of relevance to many of the world’s countries: prejudice.

The raison d’être of this chapter is to develop measures for xenophobia, homophobia, and patriarchy and, in so doing, to provide systematic information about the degree of prejudice against certain groups (foreigners, homosexuals, women) – in particular, whether prejudice differs by the world’s regions and religions and between the groups that are the target of prejudice. Furthermore, the chapter enquires about the characteristics of persons – apart from their religion and region – that make for prejudice or a lack of it. In developing the analysis, this chapter makes several conceptual contributions. It advances the concept of a “xenophobia score” which is used to measure the amount of xenophobia in different regions of the world. It links homophobia to attitudes towards homosexuality. Finally, it examines dissonance between men and women in their views about gender equality and, in so doing, measures the amount of “gender tension” among adherents of different religions and denizens of different regions. Underpinning this analysis is a multivariate analysis of xenophobia, homophobia, and patriarchy. This allows one to answer questions that are of considerable societal importance: Are women more liberal than men in their attitude towards foreigners and homosexuals? Do women seek greater equality than men are prepared to concede? This chapter develops measures for xenophobia, homophobia, and patriarchy and provides systematic information about the degree of prejudice against certain groups, foreigners, homosexuals, women –in particular, whether prejudice differs by the world’s regions and religions and between the groups that are the target of prejudice. It enquires about the characteristics of persons – apart from their religion and region – that make for prejudice or a lack of it. The chapter advances the concept of a “xenophobia score” which is used to measure the amount of xenophobia in different regions of the world. The regional data show that an illiberal attitude towards homosexuals was most pronounced in Islamic countries and least evident in Western countries. Countries of the ex–Soviet Union and African countries had the highest intolerance rates and, except for Islamic countries, the highest illiberal rates with, respectively, 74.5% and 82.8% of respondents in these regions regarding homosexuality as unjustifiable.