Public Lecture on 'Caste-based Segregation in Urban India' by Prof. Deepak Malghan at NLSIU, Bengaluru [13 August 2026; In-Person; Free; Open to All]

The National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bengaluru, and Taalasamudaya are organising a public lecture on 'Caste-based Segregation in Urban India' by Prof. Deepak Malghan on 13 August 2026 from 4:15 PM to 5:30 PM in the Conference Hall, Ground Floor, Training Centre, NLSIU.

The session is listed by NLSIU as open to the public.

Urban India is characterised by a high degree of intra-city spatial inequality in the availability of public services like piped water and sewerage. The lecture unpacks the political channels that link residential segregation with access to those services.

• 'Micro-segregation', or neighbourhood residential sorting within a ward (the elementary administrative and political unit in urban India), enables segregated neighbourhoods to better organise and petition for public services.
• Political competition further amplifies these demands from segregated neighbourhoods.
• The state's response to such demand is modulated by both in-group favouritism and out-group discrimination.
• The state's ability to indulge in such favouritism and discrimination is in turn contingent on how the caste composition of a ward differs from that of the city as a whole, described in the talk as 'macro-segregation'.

The talk sheds light on how caste continues to shape patterns of residential segregation in urban India and how caste-based inequalities are reproduced through urban governance and public policy. NLSIU states that attendees will be able to critically engage with contemporary research on caste, spatial inequality, and state capacity in India.

Deepak Malghan is a chemical engineer and ecological economist working at the interface of thermodynamics and scale theory, based at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIMB). Among other recognitions for his contributions to scale theory, he received the 2015 VKRV Rao Prize in Social Sciences and the 2023 T N Khoshoo Memorial Award. He was an editor at the field's flagship journal, Ecological Economics (2018-26), where he now serves on the editorial board.

He is an affiliated researcher at the Stockholm Environment Institute, where he conducts translational research on urban hydrology. His Ecological Political Economy group at IIMB has pioneered new methods for characterising ethnic inequality and stratification by combining tools and insights from economics, demography, and political science. As a historian, he is the co-author of an intellectual biography of J. C. Kumarappa, a pioneering Indian ecological thinker and political philosopher (Oxford University Press, 2016), and is currently working on a book project titled 'Citius, Altius, Fortius: A History of How the World Became Efficient'.

• Date: Thursday, 13 August 2026
• Time: 4:15 PM to 5:30 PM
• Mode: In person only
• Venue: Conference Hall, Ground Floor, Training Centre, NLSIU, Nagarbhavi, Bengaluru

NLSIU has not published any registration form, sign-up link or RSVP address for this lecture. The announcement simply states that the lecture is open to the public, so no registration is required. Interested attendees may walk in to the venue at the scheduled time.

There is no participation fee. The NLSIU announcement does not mention a certificate of participation, so attendees should not expect one.

Law and policy students, researchers working on urban governance, caste and social exclusion, public services and state capacity, practitioners in municipal and environmental law, and members of the public with an interest in urban inequality in India.