Who marries across caste

What this shows

How many marriages in India cross caste, in two readings of the India Human Development Survey and one of the National Family Health Survey (with its figures by State and by year of marriage), beside how many adults told Pew’s 2019-20 survey that it is very important to stop people in their community from marrying into another caste.

What it does not show: A count from an official record: every figure here is a survey answer or a study of a survey. The IHDS and NFHS figures measure inter-caste marriage differently, and no State figure from the IHDS was found.

Sources

Pew Research Center, Religion in India: Tolerance and Segregation, dated 29 Jun 2021. Survey by researchers or an NGO: a sample, not a national count.
National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) and University of Maryland, Desai S, “India Human Development Survey Research Brief No. 2”. Survey by researchers or an NGO: a sample, not a national count.
Indian Statistical Institute repository record of the article (its abstract), Ray T, Roy Chaudhuri A and Sahai K, “Whose education matters? An analysis of inter caste marriages in India”, dated 1 Aug 2020. Peer-reviewed study: a sample, not a national count.
Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 176: 619-633, Ray T, Roy Chaudhuri A and Sahai K, “Whose education matters? An analysis of inter caste marriages in India”, Abstract and sections 2, 3 and 8, dated 1 Aug 2020. Peer-reviewed study: a sample, not a national count.
Journal of International Development 38(5): 905-931, Pradeep R and Goli S, “The Equalising Effect of Marital Exogamy: Intercaste Marriages and the Reduction of Child Nutrition Inequality in India”, Table 2 and Table A5. Peer-reviewed study: a sample, not a national count.
Ideas for India (the authors’ summary of their study), Ray T, Roy Chaudhuri A and Sahai K, “Whose education matters? An analysis of inter-caste marriages in India”, dated 30 Nov 2018. Peer-reviewed study: a sample, not a national count.

Analysis by The Dalit Project, as on 12 Oct 2026.

Read these with the numbers

The Pew figures are what adults said in a survey about stopping marriages in their community, not a count of marriages. The IHDS figures are what women said of their own marriage, and the NFHS figures the caste group each partner reported. None is an official record, and no official record of marriages by caste was found.
The IHDS and NFHS figures measure different things and should not be read as a trend from one to the other. The IHDS asks a woman whether her husband’s family is of the same jati as her natal family; Pradeep and Goli count NFHS couples whose partners reported different ones of four broad caste groups, which leaves out marriages between jatis in the same group and gives a higher share.
The State figures are from the NFHS, on that broader measure. No State-by-State figure from the IHDS was found: Ray, Roy Chaudhuri and Sahai give none, and the IHDS-II unit data (ICPSR study 36151) needs a login this pipeline does not hold.
Pradeep and Goli’s finding on child nutrition is a set of regression coefficients for an index of inequality, not shown here: across five models, −0.0038, −0.0037, −0.0036, −0.0037, −0.0042 for stunting (Table 4, page 913); in the study’s words, “a unit increase in intercaste marriages reduces inequality in child stunting by 0.0038 units”. The study states no per cent change.
The IHDS brief does not give its question or say which round its 95% comes from; Ray, Roy Chaudhuri and Sahai’s 5.82% is for 2011, from IHDS-II, and they say the rate “has hovered around 5% since 1970 to 2012”.
Pew names caste categories in its own words (“Other/Most Backward Class” for the Other Backward Classes); they are shown as Pew prints them, in its order.

Key terms

Inter-caste marriage: A marriage between people of different castes. In the IHDS, as the study’s authors give it, a woman’s answer to “Is your husband’s family the same caste as your natal family?”
Couples from different caste groups: Pradeep and Goli’s measure in the NFHS: couples whose partners reported different ones of four groups, Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, Other Backward Classes and general castes. In their words, “Intercaste marriage variable is the predictor variable, which is coded as ‘1’ and labelled as ‘intercaste’ if the married man and woman reported different caste group and ‘0’ otherwise (same-caste marriage).”
IHDS: The India Human Development Survey, a household panel survey run by NCAER and the University of Maryland: round I in 2004-05, round II in 2011-12.
NFHS: The National Family Health Survey, run for the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare: NFHS-3 in 2005-06, NFHS-4 in 2015-16, NFHS-5 in 2019-21.
Jati: The caste community a person is born into, finer than the broad groups used in official lists; the IHDS question on marriage uses this word.
Scheduled Caste (SC): The constitutional category for Dalits, the communities once branded “untouchable”.
Scheduled Tribe (ST): The constitutional category for Adivasi communities.
General Category: People who belong to none of the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes or Other Backward Classes.
Margin of sampling error: How far a survey figure may be from the figure for everyone it stands for, because only a sample was asked. Pew gives a median for each group.
Peer-reviewed study: A study published in a journal after review by other researchers. Its figures cover its own sample.
Survey: A survey by researchers or an organisation, with a stated method and sample. Its figures cover its own sample.

Changelog and corrections

Version 1: First version: the IHDS brief’s share of marriages within caste, the Ray, Roy Chaudhuri and Sahai study’s rate of inter-caste marriage in 2011, and the Pradeep and Goli study’s share of NFHS couples from different caste groups, in India, by State and by year of marriage, beside Pew’s 2019-20 survey of whether people in a community should be stopped from marrying into another caste, by caste category, region, education and rural or urban area.

How corrections work. Every change is listed here.

Cite this

The Dalit Project, “Who marries across caste”, version 1, data.dalitproject.org/intercaste-marriage/, as on 12 Oct 2026.