Wealth Mobility: Notes from Two Villages of Bihar

In volume 12, issue 1, of the Review of Agrarian Studies (RAS), a special section focussed on features of contemporary agrarian Bihar drawing on data from village studies conducted as part of the Project on Agrarian Relations in India (PARI).1 One of the issues highlighted by these papers was the extreme inequality in the ownership of land and other assets, with a “high correlation between land ownership and caste and class status in the study villages.” (Dhar, Pandey, and Kumar 2022). This Note explores a further aspect of wealth inequality, namely the extent to which inequality is moderated by mobility. Using a small panel of households from these two villages for the period 2012-18, we construct mobility matrices with respect to ownership of wealth, and examine the extent and type of mobility, in particular, the type of upward mobility experienced by households from the oppressed castes.