The Backward Classes

This past week my coworkers and I spent three days in Koraput doing fieldwork for our case study. From what I can gather, Koraput is most known for two things: being astonishingly beautiful and being one of the most “backward” places in India.

Fifty percent of Koraput’s population belongs to scheduled tribes. Scheduled tribes are aboriginal groups that the government of India has identified as having been socially and economically discriminated against and in need of social welfare assistance. An additional, 13 percent of the population belongs to scheduled castes. These are essentially people who were untouchables under the caste system and are now afforded special privileges under the constitution. On top of that, there is a small percentage of the population who have been recognized as “other backward classes.” These people may belong to smaller or hardly known tribes who also have not benefitted from India’s economic boom.

There are quite a number of cultural differences between the backward classes and mainstream Indians. To name a few: they wear different clothing and jewelery, celebrate different festivals, adhere to different belief systems and the norm is to have love marriages.

For tribal people, the main industry is agriculture. However, this has been difficult to sustain in the industrial world as they have been stripped of a lot of their land. Also historic discrimination has created a population that is ripe for revolution. Koraput in particular has been a stronghold for Naxalites, a Maoist group that is using violent means to promote change. In the last year, they have targeted government offices and uniformed officials. These safety concerns make it difficult to get qualified people to stay in the area to do development work.

The government of India has partnered with a number of external agencies to design interventions in Koraput to accelerate the delivery of services. These interventions are in sectors ranging from education, to health, to nutrition, to rural infrastructure to water and sanitation. Part of our job as researchers is to look at some of these interventions to see how they are fairing. I guess I’ll let you know what we find in August.