Data & Analytics
Caste and Household Expenditure Gaps in Uttar Pradesh
ACCESS 2018 analysis of 3,002 Uttar Pradesh respondents showing a ₹1,385 mean monthly expenditure gap between General and Reserved castes that narrows but persists among landowners.
Role: Analyst (Columbia SIPA U7514)
Situation
Caste remains a structural marker of economic opportunity in India. Measuring expenditure and landowning gaps in Uttar Pradesh is a policy-relevant way to test whether differences survive simple compositional controls.
Decision question
ACCESS 2018 analysis of 3,002 Uttar Pradesh respondents showing a ₹1,385 mean monthly expenditure gap between General and Reserved castes that narrows but persists among landowners.
Data and constraints
See method and results below for sample, coverage, and documented limits.
Method
Cleaned ACCESS 2018 household survey data in R (dplyr), constructed a Reserved-caste dummy (SC, ST, OBC vs. General), and compared mean monthly expenditure overall, among own-land agricultural households, and by gender and high-school-plus education among landowners.
Tools
- R
- dplyr
- DescTools
- Household survey analysis
Deliverables
- Knitted R Markdown analysis (January 2026)
- Caste, landowning, and expenditure gap tables
Outcome / decision value
- General-caste mean monthly expenditure ₹7,861 vs. ₹6,475 for Reserved castes (gap ₹1,385).
- General-caste respondents are 24% of the UP sample but 33% of own-land agricultural households.
- The General–Reserved gap among landowners is ₹865, so landowning explains part—but not all—of the expenditure difference.