Legal Segregation, Ethno-Religious Boundaries, and Urban Inequality in India’s Disturbed Areas Act

• In Event: Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 4. Global Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility

Abstract

This paper examines how a contemporary legal segregation regime reshapes urban inequality and democratic inclusion in India. Gujarat’s Disturbed Areas Act (DAA) allows the state to restrict property sales between Hindus and Muslims in designated neighborhoods, effectively giving officials the power to redraw ethno-religious boundaries in real time. Using newly compiled data that link legal designations to neighborhood demographics, housing markets, violence, and school infrastructure, I ask how this law redistributes security, investment, and opportunity across urban space.

The analysis shows that DAA designations disproportionately target mixed or Hindu-majority areas where Muslims are a growing minority, and that they do not deliver the housing and amenity premia commonly associated with white-only neighborhoods in United States segregation research. Instead, designated areas see relative house price declines, stalled projects, increased congestion, and sharp cuts in government school grants and infrastructure, alongside rising civilian and communal violence. These patterns suggest that legal segregation operates as a stigmatizing signal that coordinates political neglect and private disinvestment rather than protecting the dominant group.

Conceptually, the paper brings economic evidence into dialogue with theories of state capacity, territorial stigmatization, and political neglect. It shows how a democratic state uses law and bureaucratic discretion to harden group boundaries and reshape everyday life for a religious minority, while also imposing economic costs on majority residents. By documenting the short-run, neighborhood-level consequences of a policy that is now being proposed as a model for other Indian states, the project provides tools for sociologists, advocates, and policymakers who seek to challenge exclusionary urban governance and imagine more equitable futures.

Author

• Shreya Dutt, Boston University