Surnames Still Shape Salaries in Urban India

India's constitution prohibits discrimination on grounds of caste in public employment. But it turns out that the actions taking place within the walls of private offices have an entirely different set of rules.

What the Data Shows

Structural barriers to advancement of non-upper-caste employees have been shown in research on academic employment in India, that people with upper-caste surnames in the service sector earn more than those with the same qualifications but with non-upper-caste names, and that those with the non-upper-caste names are less likely to be in senior positions, especially in Indian-owned firms.

According to the Discrimination Report by Oxfam India, which analyses data from the National Sample Survey and Periodic Labour Force Survey, discrimination against both SC and ST workers in regular salaried urban jobs has come down from 2004-05 to 2019-20, but wage discrimination in casual jobs for the same groups is a significant and largely overlooked issue.

The IT sector is not exempted

Despite being counted among the most meritocratic and caste-blind sectors in the country, which depend on technical qualifications, research into India's IT industry has revealed that this is not the case: despite this, "deep-seated caste biases" remain and those in upper-caste positions continue to dominate most Indian firms on the boards of directors and in leadership roles.

It has been reported, in certain instances, that Indian IT professionals who choose to relocate abroad have taken these hierarchies with them to their jobs in the U.S. or the U.K.

Policy gaps in the private sector

In mid-2026 a policy analysis published reported that India's constitutional and legislative armoury against caste disadvantage, which includes reservations, post-matric scholarships and special recruitment drives, was almost exclusively focused on public employment.

The analysis noted that more than 90 per cent of India's workforce is employed in the private and informal sectors, which are “unfortunately not covered by the same toolkit” as other areas that have anti-discrimination frameworks, such as wage equality protections against caste-based discrimination.

The next frontier of artificial intelligence

New studies have given an additional layer of worry. A study of the new PLFS report, which covers 83,000 employed graduates across 15 districts, noted that ST and SC graduates were 0.24 to 0.37 standard deviations less exposed to AI tools than their upper caste counterparts because of their relative underrepresentation in managerial, software and finance occupations, which have higher exposure premiums of up to 20 per cent.

The researcher of the study has starkly concluded that "if we do not take targeted measures, generative AI is likely to aggravate the caste disparity in earning in India".