Are the issues of socioeconomic inequalities related to specific caste biases in Contemporary India? Why are some social groups in the socioeconomic ladder lagging compared to others? How much have the poor people living in rural areas in India achieved their esteemed goals in the present economic arena of development? Is it the limited educational attainment or lack of physical and social capital of the poor households that begets inter-group economic inequality? Or is it a social identity that impedes the well-being of a certain social group? In search of answering these questions, this article explores the role of castes in explaining socioeconomic inequalities in the rural settings of contemporary India. The limited access to basic amenities and the poor educational attainment of the lower castes and the dominance of the upper castes in these regards show the persistence of social group inequalities. Four remote villages of Purulia district, one of the most backward tribal districts of West Bengal were systematically selected for scrutiny to explore socioeconomic inequality within the caste structure. Two are tribal villages with low inequality and the other two are multi-caste-oriented villages with high inequality.
The paper aims to analyze poverty issues in rural households of India sampled purposively from the perspective of per capita Monthly Consumption Expenditure. In addition, the decomposition of poverty across social group affiliation and economic status adds another flavor to this study. The study concentrates on one of the backward areas of West Bengal, the district of Purulia, a resource-poor district with a distinct presence of scheduled social group population. The candidate villages were selected purposively keeping in mind the aspects of physical isolation and socio-economic stagnancy. Quantitative tools like Stepwise Multiple Regression and Decomposition analysis by FGT indices were instrumental in estimating the relative strengths of the factors affecting poverty. Besides, the study has simultaneously added the life history approach to integrate the QUAN-QUAL methods with an aim to produce a more complete picture. The critical findings include that the scheduled social groups, especially tribes, and daily wage casual laborers followed by agricultural laborers, were identified as the most vulnerable to poverty indicators in their respective population segments.
An increasing access and enrolment do not necessarily ensure school effectiveness or educational progress. They are, of course, other parameters of development of education, rather than being measures of standards of quality education. The present paper opts to scrutinize whether infrastructural development in schools at all ensures good educational development or not. To accomplish this, Education Infrastructural Index has been prepared through Access, Facility and Teacher Index whereas a combination of Enrollment Index and Literacy Index gave rise Educational Development Index. The study reveals that accessibility factor begets a division within rural spaces in the form of backward rural, rural and prosperous rural that manifests through the availability of the teachers and facilities. In the urban areas, wherein accessibility is not a matter of concern, facilities and teachers matter in making difference between the less developed and developed urban areas. The higher Educational Development Index at the non-rural areas indicates town- centric nature of the development of our educational system. Superimposition of the infrastructural and developmental parameters revealed that good infrastructure does not always ensure good educational achievement. In the light of these backdrops, the key purpose of this article is to measuring spatiality in infrastructure and development of high school education in Hooghly District of West Bengal, India.
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