Dalit Women : Socio-Economic Status and Issues

Contents: Preface. 1. Life of Dalit Women in India. 2. Dalits and new economic. 3. Economic, social and cultural rights of Dalit women. 4. The economic exclusion of the Dalits in India. 5. The Dalit movement and political economy. 6. Dalit women and reservation policy. 7. Caste class and social change. 8. Political identity of Dalits. 9. Gender and caste injustice: Poor women in rural India. 10. The status of Dalit women in India’s caste based system. 11. Strengthening Dalit Women’s participation in public sphere. Bibliography.

Dalit women are known to have some distinct demographic features and these features have important implications for their socio-economic development, very little attempt has been made to analyse them and relate them to their problems. Dalits are commonly clustered together in segregated hamlets at the edge of a village. They are a small and vulnerable minority in any given region, making resistance to exploitation and violence very difficult. They constitute over sixteen per cent of the total Indian population.

Interaction between socio-economic and demographic factors of change is an important and interesting topic of study in respect of any society.  Such a study assumes overwhelming importance in the case of Dalit societies known for their backwardness and extremely slow process of socio-economic change.

The approach in the present book has been a mixed one in respect of methodology. We have studied economic-demographic situation of the Dalit women as a whole and at the same time analysed the disaggregated data for different Dalit groups with a view to understanding the interaction between demographic and other socio-economic factors through cross-section comparison. For this we have totally depended on census data and obviously non-availability of disaggregated demographic data at the level of specific Dalits has imposed limitations on our analysis.