The first direct astimate of inter-cast marriages in india, just five per cent of Indians said they had married a person from a different caste.
The India Human Development Survey said what female respondents interpreted as a “different caste” is likely to have been subjective, the University of Maryland, also reported that 30 per cent of rural and 20 per cent of urban households said they practised untouchability.
Representative by class and social group, the IHDS is the largest non-government, pan-Indian household survey. It covers over 42,000 households.
The proportion being marginally higher for urban over rural India, When married women aged between 15 and 49 were asked if theirs was an inter-caste marriage, just 5.4 per cent said yes,
Dr .Desai said that, “So the IHDS took a simple approach and asked women whether their natal family belongs to the same caste as their husband’s family, allowing us to bypass the complex issue of defining what caste means and get subjective percept-ions from our respondents.”
Comparing the answers that the husbands and wives of the same household gave to the National Family Health Survey, researchers Kumudini Das, K.C. Das, T.K. Roy and P.K. Tripathy found that 11 per cent of couples in the 2005-06 NFHS stated different caste groups.
A third of rural respondents and a fifth of urban respondents admitted to practising untouchability. The practice was most common among Brahmins (62 per cent in rural India, 39 per cent in urban), followed by Other Backward Classes (OBCs) and then non-Brahmin forward castes.