this is a major question for any parent. given the general belief that India is a growing economic power, one would think that this is given in India. but I have observed in Kerala that many people are mired in a no-win situation, and that they do not progress from generation to generation. btw, raj chetty's research in the US implied the same in the US: social mobility there is much less what one believes, given the old Horatio Alger story etc.
one set of people I have observed are the housemaids. we find large numbers of them coming daily from nearby rural areas to work in middle-class households (often traveling an hour each way by bus).
the sad state of affairs is that every housemaid has the same story: a husband who is usually a day laborer, who brings very little money home, because he spends it all on booze and lottery tickets. he often beats the woman up as well. and it is up to the woman to scrimp and save on her income, which may be around 15,000 rupees a month, to bring up and educate her children.
what is sad is that the children don't do any better. they end up depending on the mothers working into their late 60s to bring in money, and the sons end up the same way as their fathers. the daughters end up the same way as their mothers: either hand-to-mouth existence, or they become housemaids too.
they are a single medical emergency away from bankruptcy.
this is true also of those who have gone to the "gelf" from the lower middle classes. they may make money, but fritter it away on conspicuous consumption, with no long=term savings.
it is true that other migrants have done well: for instance, nurses have ended up taking their husbands as well as siblings and even parents to Europe or the US as migrants (although that is getting harder and harder) and anyway they are able to send decent sums of money home as remittances.
similarly, middle-class skilled migrant professionals to the middle east like doctors, engineers, accountants etc have also done quite well.
but the fact remains that the lower-middle class migrants end up being (un)skilled labor in the middle east, or drivers, or other such hard occupations, and their health is ruined, and they are not able to return and earn a living for a long time in India.
the case of Kerala might be unusual in that there really are no jobs at home: no agriculture, no industry, and nobody wants to do the hard labor kinds of work. so that makes it attractive for so-called Bengalis (who are mostly illegal alien Bangladeshis and rohingya) to come over and work in Kerala.
on the contrary, here is a paper from 2018 that seems to have a far more rosy picture of intergenerational mobility, and according to it, the south is stellar.
https://barrett.dyson.cornell.edu/NEUDC/paper_560.pdf
you tell me, is this true, or is my observation of stasis more true?
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