23 percent families have no literate adults; 6.68 lakh depend on begging
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New Delhi: Minister for rural development Choudhary Birendra Singh stressed that withholding of the caste data in the Census should not be linked with the coming Bihar Assembly polls. He added that this part of the census was purely in the domain of the DG (Census).
The census revealed that one out of three families living in villages is landless and depends on manual labour for their livelihood. The SECC 2011, which is the first paperless census conducted on handheld electronic devices by the government in 640 districts, says that 23.52 per cent of rural families have no literate adult above the age of 25 years, indicating the poor state of education among the rural masses.
It further revealed that there were a total of 24.39 crore households in the country, of which 17.91 crore lived in villages. Of these, 10.69 crore were considered as deprived households.
The census stated about 30 per cent of rural households belong to the Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST) group, with 29.43 per cent of the households belonging to the SC and ST category across the country. Punjab leads the states with the highest number of SC population with 36.74 per cent, followed by West Bengal (28.45 per cent), Tamil Nadu (25.55 per cent) and Himachal Pradesh (23.97 per cent). As far as the ST population is concerned, Mizoram has the highest percentage with 98.79 per cent, followed by Lakshadweep (96.59 per cent), Nagaland (93.91 per cent) and Meghalaya (90.36 per cent). The average percentages of SC and ST category are 18.46 per cent and 10.97 per cent respectively.
Even though manually scavenging is banned in the country, the census stated that Tripura has the highest percentage of manual scavengers, with 2.50 per cent of its rural population still engaged in this menial work. The national average for manual scavengers in rural India is 0.10 per cent, or 18.06 lakh, across the country. Tripura (17,332) is followed by Mizoram with 0.92 per cent of its population still pursuing manual scavenging. As many as nine states and one Union territory (Delhi) has zero manual scavengers.
( Source : deccan chronicle )
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