ABSTRACT
Effects of inbreeding have been studied on diverse traits namely mortality, selection intensity and anthropometric traits in socio-economically divergent castes with different inbreeding levels taking into consideration the extent of marital migration and assortative marriage by profession in these populations. Mala, Madiga of the scheduled castes and Reddy, Vvsya and Maheshwari of the forward castes constituted the sample populations. Analysis of inbreeding effects revealed low mortality load, high selection intensity and inbreeding elevation of anthropometric traits in the forward castes. Wide differences in parameters of populations structure such as inbreeding, marital migration, assortative marriage by profession and gene-environment interactions could be causing differences in homozygosities of deleterious/ ill adapted genes in these castes leading to the results observed.