New Delhi: Urban and rural neighbourhoods in India display a high level of segregation along caste and religious lines, with such marginalised neighbourhoods having significantly less access to public services, a working paper on residential segregation of Scheduled Caste (SC) and Muslim communities shows.The paper, published by the Massachusetts-based nonprofit National Bureau of Economic Research, is based on data collected from 1.5 million Indian neighbourhoods and found that the segregation on the basis of both caste and religion is nearly the same as current levels of racial segregation in the US.According to the paper, 26% of India’s Muslims live in neighbourhoods that are more than 80% Muslim, while 17% of SCs live in neighbourhoods that are more than 80% SC. Scheduled Caste segregation in cities is just as high as it is in rural areas, and it is even higher for Muslims, the data shows.The paper also found that government services – like secondary schools, clinics and hospitals, electricity, water, and sewerage – were all “systematically worse” in marginalised neighbourhoods as compared to other localities in the same cities. The paper said that such differences in service access were “statistically significant and substantial”. The paper found that children from such segregated neighbourhoods are likely to fare worse than those from non-marginalised localities. “A child growing up in a 100% Muslim neighborhood can expect to obtain two fewer years of education than a child growing up in a 0% Muslim neighborhood. Kids living in SC neighborhoods face a penalty only slightly smaller. The neighbourhood effect explains about half of the urban educational disadvantage of SC and Muslim children,” the paper said.The authors of the paper – Sam Asher, Kritarth Jha, Anjali Adukia, Paul Novosad and Brandon Tan – note that while the data analysed in the study dates back to 2011-13, the “neighbourhood patterns described in the paper are likely to be persistent and have emerged over decades of migration and policy.”