We present the first ever neighbourhood-scale portrait of caste-based residential segregation in Indian cities. Residential segregation studies in Indian cities have relied on ward-level data. We demonstrate in this paper that wards cannot approximate an urban neighborhood, and that they are heterogeneous. For a typical ward, the neighbourhood-ward dissimilarity index is greater than the ward-city dissimilarity index. Using 2011 enumeration block (EB) level census data for five major cities in

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... ndia – Bengaluru, Chennai, Delhi, Kolkata, and Mumbai – we show how patterns of caste-based urban residential segregation operate in contemporary India. We also present the first visual snapshot of caste-based residential segregation in an Indian city using georeferenced EB level data for Bengaluru. Besides implications for policy, our analysis also points to the need for publicly available, geospatially-linked neighborhood-scale census data that includes data on economic class for a spatial understanding of economic and social stratification within Indian cities. En