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Aychuta Samanta’s KISS: Mainstreaming Marginalized Communities through Education
Magnitude Of The Problem
In India, the scheduled tribes were the most deprived sections of society. According to the census of 2001, scheduled tribes comprised 84,326,240 people, i.e., 8.2% of the population in India. The majority of them lived in the rural areas and formed 10.4 % of the total rural population of the country. The share of the scheduled tribe population in urban areas was a meager 2.4%. Among the Indian states, Odisha was one of the poorest. In Odisha, the scheduled tribe population of 8,145,081 accounted for 22.1% of the total population of the state and 9.7% of the total tribal population of the country. Of the scheduled tribes in Odisha, 94.5% lived in villages. There were 62 tribes including 13 primitive tribal groups in the state......... |
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The Indian government had introduced constitutional safeguards such as affirmative action and various welfare programs for these marginalized groups (See Exhibit I for the constitutional safeguards for Scheduled Tribes in India). But even after almost seven decades of the country’s independence from British rule, most of those belonging to the scheduled tribes lived in abject poverty. ........
