• Family, caste, tribe, and the market are key social institutions studied for their role in forming communities and sustaining society.

• These institutions also play a significant role in creating and sustaining inequality and exclusion.

• Social inequality and exclusion are common and visible in everyday life in India, such as beggars, child labour, and prejudice against minority groups, women, and the differently abled.

• Everyday exposure to inequality makes it appear natural or inevitable.

• People often justify inequality by blaming the poor or marginalised, assuming they lack ability or effort.

• In reality, those at the lower ranks of society often work extremely hard, yet life chances remain limited.

• Hard, physically demanding work (e.g., stone breaking, digging, carrying heavy weights, pulling rickshaws) is disproportionately done by the poor.

• The myth of upward mobility is largely fictional; few poor workers rise to positions of significant economic power.

• Media, such as films, exaggerate the possibility of dramatic social mobility, often requiring illegal or unscrupulous methods.

What Is Social About Social Inequality and Exclusion?

• Social inequality and exclusion have three broad characteristics:

• They are social because they concern groups rather than individuals.

• They are social in the sense that they are distinct from purely economic factors, although there is often a strong link between social and economic inequality.

• They are systematic and structured, showing a definite pattern in how social inequalities are organized.

• These three aspects define the social nature of inequality and exclusion.

Social Inequality

• In every society, some people have a greater share of valued resources such as money, property, education, health, and power.

• Social resources can be divided into three forms of capital:

  • Economic capital – material assets and income

  • Cultural capital – educational qualifications and status

  • Social capital – networks of contacts and social associations (Bourdieu 1986)

• These forms of capital often overlap and can be converted into one another (e.g., economic capital enabling access to education/cultural capital).

• Social inequality refers to patterns of unequal access to social resources.

• Some inequality reflects innate differences (ability or effort), but most social inequality is produced by society.

• Social stratification is the system by which people are ranked in a hierarchy, shaping identity, relationships, and access to resources.

• Three key principles of social stratification:

  1. It is a societal characteristic, not just individual differences; more advanced societies with surplus production exhibit unequal distribution of resources.

  2. It persists over generations, often ascribed through family, inheritance, and practices like endogamy (marriage within the same caste).

  3. It is supported by beliefs or ideology, justified as fair or inevitable (e.g., caste hierarchy based on purity and pollution).

• Social exclusion and discrimination are not only economic but also relate to gender, religion, ethnicity, language, caste, and disability.

• Prejudices are pre-conceived opinions or attitudes toward a group, formed without evidence and resistant to change; can be positive or negative.

• Stereotypes are fixed and inflexible characterizations of a group, ignoring variation across individuals, time, and context; often affect ethnic, racial groups, and women.

• Many stereotypes in India have colonial origins, e.g., some communities labelled as “martial races,” others as lazy, cowardly, or untrustworthy.

• Discrimination refers to actual behavior based on prejudice, often subtle or disguised, such as denying jobs or opportunities to certain groups while claiming merit-based reasons.