Fifty Meters Apart
Asher, Jha, Novosad, Adukia, and Tan report that Muslim and Scheduled Caste segregation in India is "only slightly lower than Black-White segregation in the U.S." A segregation index, however, is a measure of unevenness, not an explanation of what produced it or what sort of social reality it represents.
When is clustering concerning?
Communities cluster for many reasons. Some are mechanical: historical settlement patterns that predate the modern housing market. Some are functional: kinship networks, shared language, community institutions, dietary compatibility, marriage markets. Some are concerning: exclusion from housing markets, communal violence, concentrated disadvantage. And some are actively beneficial: under first-past-the-post, geographic concentration lets a minority elect its own representatives; religiously concentrated neighborhoods that are economically diverse can produce the inter-class contact that segregated cities otherwise lack (Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged, 1987).
In the American case, the number carries weight because it stands for a specific history: restrictive covenants, redlining, white flight, and concentrated poverty. But Western democracies have not always treated ethnic clustering as a problem. Canada adopted an official multiculturalism policy in 1971 with the explicit purpose of recognizing, accommodating, and supporting cultural diversity (Banting and Kymlicka, 2006). The UK and the Netherlands pursued similar frameworks. The philosophical rationale, developed most fully by Kymlicka (Multicultural Citizenship, 1995), was that cultural membership provides the context within which individuals make meaningful choices, and that supporting community maintenance is a liberal value.
The empirical evidence is also ambiguous. Edin, Fredriksson, and Åslund find that ethnic enclaves in Sweden improve labor market outcomes for less-skilled refugee immigrants (QJE, 2003).
Benign causes in the Indian context
Shahjahanabad in Delhi was built in 1639. The old city of Hyderabad was founded in 1591. The walled city of Ahmedabad dates to 1411. These neighborhoods are Muslim today because they were Muslim when they were built. The dissimilarity index cannot tell you how much of the current composition reflects centuries of continuity and how much reflects active sorting in a modern housing market.
Even where neighborhoods are newer, community life generates clustering. Some Muslims may prefer living near mosques where the muezzin's call sounds five times a day, near halal meat shops, near madrassas and religious schools, near the networks that arrange marriages and organize festivals. The muezzin's call is also relevant in the other direction: non-Muslims who find it disruptive have reason to sort away. The clustering reflects both pull toward community institutions and push away from incompatible routines.
The housing market adds a further mechanism. Housing societies and landlords across urban India exclude non-vegetarian tenants, especially in Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Rajasthan (Outlook India, 2024; Article 14). To the extent Muslims are likelier to eat meat, vegetarian Hindu households may sort away from Muslims as a byproduct. ("Vegetarian only" may also be used to exclude people you don't like; see The Revealer, 2025.)
These mechanisms are not specific to Muslims. Marwaris, Tamils, Bengalis, and Jains all cluster in Indian cities. The paper measures clustering for Muslims and Scheduled Castes. It does not measure it for any other group. Without that comparison, there is no way to know whether Muslim clustering is unusual or just the Indian urban baseline.
Density and exposure
A 500-person enumeration block in old Delhi might cover a single physical city block, perhaps 50 meters across. The adjacent block, 50 meters away, might have a very different demographic composition. A vegetable seller from one block serves customers from both. Children play across block boundaries. The dissimilarity index registers high segregation. The lived reality is dense, daily inter-group contact.
A US census tract that is 80% Black might span a square mile. The nearest majority-white tract might be several miles away, across a highway. Indian urban density is roughly an order of magnitude higher than American. Mumbai averages over 20,000 people per square kilometer. Houston averages about 1,500. At Indian densities, high block-level demographic homogeneity is compatible with high daily inter-group exposure.
How people move through cities sharpens the point. Very few urban Indians own cars. Houses are small, so life happens in shared public space: streets, markets, chai stalls, autorickshaws, trains. In American cities, a car commuter traverses demographically different neighborhoods in a sealed private space. An Indian commuter walks, cycles, or takes public transit through them, sharing physical space with everyone along the route. The same residential segregation index corresponds to fundamentally different levels of actual inter-group contact.