SCs/STs form half of India's poor: Survey
Subodh Ghildiyal, TNN | Apr 12, 2011, 01.52am IST
NEW DELHI: Scheduled Castes and Tribes constitute half of the total
"poor, deprived households", a pilot survey to identify the Below
Poverty Line population has found.
The survey found that SCs/STs were a mere 25% of the "non-poor
households" who showed deprivation on some of the parameters --
ranging from housing to illiteracy to homelessness and destitution.
The findings reiterate the long-held hypothesis that dalits are the
most-underprivileged sections of population and the easiest marker of
poverty.
The pilot survey is significant given that results have come from the
representative sample of 166 villages across 22 states. It will form
the basis for the full-fledged survey to be conducted soon to identify
the poor.
Vivek Kumar, sociologist with Jawaharlal Nehru University, said the
findings proved that caste and class identities in the country
overlapped and the social identity of dalits led to cumulative
deprivation cutting across parameters for identification of poor.
"Economic deprivation depends on social identity," he said, summing up
the inferences from the pilot survey.
That 22% of the population (SC/ST) forms half of the country's rural
poor is in line with known facts about poverty statistics but it is
startling that the theory continues to hold good. After the pilot
survey, the anticipated household exercise to identify the poor – with
methodology refined by Planning Commission member Mihir Shah for the
Union rural development ministry – would show where the final figures
stand for the country.
While dalits and tribals form the bulk of poor households, their share
drops to 25% among the non-poor households with deprivation, a fact
which underlines the relationship between SC/STs and economic status.
The communities are not just poor but also score high on kuchcha
housing, illiteracy among adults, homelessness, destitution,
landlessness with agricultural wages as their main source of income.
The BPL survey is crucial because the identified families would form
the target group of government's subsidy-based welfare schemes.
According to observers, the BPL survey is crucial to the fate of
dalits because they form the bulk of beneficiaries of targeted
welfare.
Vivek Kumar concurred with the findings of the pilot survey, saying,
"YB Damle in 1970s had shown that social identity has an impact on the
economic performance of people."
The coming BPL survey would see a change in the methodology from
previous years. The analysis of pilot survey by Planning Commission
has shown that earlier BPL surveys could have been off the mark by as
high as 50%.
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