ii This is also known as the Bihar Rural Livelihoods Project.

iii This literature follows Bourguignon (1979), Cowell (1980) and Shorrocks (1980), who decompose total inequality into inequality between subgroups and within subgroups and permit the quantification of the “contribution” of inequality from subgroups to overall inequality.

> iv Another strand of this literature uses the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition, and its variants, to identify the structural drivers of inequality (Boorah 2005; Kijima 2006; Gang, Sen and Yun 2008; Zacharias and <mark>Vakulabharanam 2011; Deininger, Jin and Nagarajan 2013</mark> ). A consistent theme of this literature is the persistence of systematic disparities across different caste groups over long periods of time that are not fully explained by differences in human capital investment, labor market returns or location of residence (state or rural/urban residence).

v We rely on verbatim responses to the jati and caste-status reported by the respondent to the household module, who is the household head in majority cases. Where self-reported caste status deviates from the rest of the jati group, we preserve the jati response and assign the caste status of the jati’s modal household.

> vi Jatis with smaller sub-samples are grouped together into a category we call “Others” defined separately for each caste-group.

> vii The Government of India has categorized disadvantaged castes into three main categories - Scheduled Castes (SC), Scheduled Tribes (ST) and Other Backward Castes (OBC). The Government of Bihar also recognizes an additional group of Extremely Backward Classes (EBC), which were originally included in the broader OBC group.

> viii A nationwide caste census was conducted as part of the Socio-Economic and Caste Census in 2011, but results have not been released by the Government of India.

ix Traditionally “rat-catchers,” the Musahars are now largely agricultural laborers and Musahar men have increasingly migrated out of the state with women joining the labor force (Mukul 1999). The Chamar jati, on the other hand, though also classified as SC, is found throughout India and consists of many different sub-jatis that vary significantly in status. In many states such as Uttar Pradesh and Punjab, they have been successful in mobilizing themselves politically.

xYadavs are traditionally a group of jatis whose main occupations were related to dairy farming and pastoral agriculture in the Bihar and Uttar Pradesh region (Hutton 1946). The group now includes a wide range of pastoral agriculturalists in numerous states of India. Since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it has mobilized itself to improve its social standing (Jaffrelot 2003).

> xi The bootstrap is performed for 1,000 iterations.

xii For a distribution, ���, ��, ... , ���, the general formula of the General Entropy class of inequality measures is given by ������ ������� ��� ∑���� ������� �1� where �� is mean income. An inequality measure, I, from a partition Π can be decomposed as �� ���Π�� ���Π�, where ���Π� is the inequality from between group differences and ���Π� is the inequality attributed to within group differences. Given a particular partition Π of the sample and an inequality measure I, the conventional measure of between group inequality is given by ���Π�� ������ ~~.~~ For further details, refer to Cowell and Jenkins (1995), Elbers et al (2008). xiii The traditional ELMO measure is given by �����Π� ����� ; where the denominator is the maximum between group ������|�������,�� inequality that can be obtained by reassigning individuals across J subgroups in partition Π of size ����. An illustration of this measure can be found in Lanjouw and Rao (2011). In order to minimize the computational burden in estimating the maximum subgroup inequality, we use an alternative measure proposed in Elbers et al. (2008), which the authors refer to as the ‘alternative’ ELMO statistic. In addition to fixing the number and sizes of subgroups, it requires that subgroups be arrayed according to their observed mean incomes- preserving their rank order.

> xiv These estimates are lower than previously reported estimates of the contribution of between-caste inequality to inequality in India, but we emphasize that we are examining the poorest areas of one of the poorest states, with low overall levels of inequality (Mutakar 2005; Subramanian and Jayaraj 2006; Boorah et al. 2014).

xv Endline surveys were collected at a gap of 1.5 to 2 years from the baseline surveys. We merge the SHG membership from these surveys with the baseline data.

xvi In our sample, although membership under PVP SHGs is only 21 percent, SHG membership as a whole is almost 50 percent, which reflects the long history of the SHG movement in Tamil Nadu.

xvii We report full regression results only for the broad caste regressions. For the jati regressions we only report the jati coefficients.

xviii Households must have a job-card to participate in the program. Each rural household is entitled to a free job card with photographs of all adult members living in the household. These adult members may then apply for employment and the 21