Public-Private Wage Gap in the Indian Mining and Quarrying Industry

This article examines if there is a wage gap between public and private mining (and quarrying) workers in India, using the NSS data (2004-2005, 2009-2010 and 2011-2012). We employ linear and quantile regressions to estimate the wage gap. The ordinary least squares (OLS) results suggest that workers in the public sector mines (and quarries) earn 59 per cent more than their private sector counterparts. However, the wage gap is not uniform across the conditional wage distribution. The quantile regression estimates show that the magnitude of the wage gap is larger at the bottom quantile than at the top; the gap reduces as we move up the wage distribution. Observations drawn from our sub-sample analysis concur with these findings.