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Moving up the energy ladder: does socio-religious status matter?

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Abstract

This paper investigates the role played by socio-religious categories in determining primary cooking fuel choices among Indian households. We study this role in the broader context of climbing up the energy ladder. Our estimates based on a sample of 601,509 households and using multinomial probit regression suggest that socio-religious status along with economic status is critical in the choice of modern eco-friendly fuels. We find that belonging to a marginalized community in Hindu religion significantly dampens a households’ likelihood to move up the ladder when compared with upper caste households. While intra-religion differences among Hindu castes in terms of their probability of using modern fuels are wider, differences among Muslims appear smaller. Also, though Muslims perform worse than Hindu upper castes in terms of probability of using modern fuels they are much better off in comparison with other Hindu castes. Our results remain robust to alternative specifications and several robustness checks.

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Notes

  1. Other Backward Classes, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes are a part of government recognized classification for population in India.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thankfully acknowledge the detailed and excellent review received from the Editor and four anonymous referees leading to substantial improvement of the paper. The second author also thanks Arindam Banerjee, Arnab K. Laha and Ankur Sarin for many useful discussions on choice modelling. However, the authors remain responsible for any remaining errors.

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  1. Indian Institute of Management Lucknow, Lucknow, 226013, India

    Prashant Poddar, Debdatta Pal & Somdeep Chatterjee

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  1. Prashant Poddar
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Appendix

Appendix

Social groups according to IHDS classification

In this section, we calculate predicted probabilities and marginal effects for different social groups based on Indian Human Development Survey classification (Social groups| Indian Human Development Survey, n.d.). The survey suggests 8 social groups. For the purpose of our study the relevant classification becomes upper castes (includes Hindu forward castes and Brahmins), Other Backward castes (includes Hindu and Sikh OBC’s), Dalits (includes all Scheduled castes irrespective of religion), Adivasis (includes all Scheduled tribes irrespective of religion), Sikhs and Jains (Includes all Sikhs and Jains except OBC Sikhs), Christians (includes all Christians) and others (anyone else).

When we compare these results with our estimates, we observe that upper caste Hindus still have the highest predicted probability of using modern fuels among all the social groups. They are followed by Muslims in terms of predicted probability of using modern fuels. In our classification too, we had found that Muslim upper castes (or Muslim general) and Muslim OBC’s had the second highest probability of using modern fuels behind Hindu upper castes. In IHDS classification too, we find that Other Backward Castes (includes Hindu and Sikh OBC’s) lag behind Hindu upper castes. We also find that Dalits and Adivasis, irrespective of religion lag behind Hindu upper castes in terms of probability of using modern fuels. In our analysis, we had observed Hindu Scheduled Castes (Hindu Dalits) and Hindu Scheduled Tribes (Adivasis) to be lagging behind Hindu upper castes. Although we cannot compare our main estimates with the estimates from IHDS classification in its entirety, we still observe that the basic nature of our results still holds true.

Table 11 Predicted probabilities for different socio-religious categories: IHDS classification
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Table 12 Marginal effects of caste for different religions
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Table 13 Marginal effects of religion for different castes
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Table 14 Multinomial probit regression for urban and rural sub-samples
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Fig. 1
figure 1

Modern fuel usage by Socio-religious affiliation

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Fig. 2
figure 2

Modern fuel usage by Wealth Score deciles

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Poddar, P., Pal, D. & Chatterjee, S. Moving up the energy ladder: does socio-religious status matter?. Popul Environ 42, 325–359 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11111-020-00365-3

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