Chennai: Nearly 79 per cent of households in Tamil Nadu earn less than Rs 5,000 monthly, which is shockingly only Rs 165 a day. Like most parts of the country, even in Tamil Nadu, 55.08 percent are landless and are mainly dependent on manual casual labour as an occupation, according to the socio-economic caste census released by the Centre.The survey also shows that in Tamil Nadu, 25.55 per cent of the households are under SC category and 1.81 per cent under ST category. Unfortunately, the state also has 26.38 per cent of illiterates. The data shows that 33.38 per cent of people live in ‘kaccha’ houses.
According to government, these statistics will be used as a basis for future planning for development of rural areas and also to reduce poverty by a considerable margin. Many like Mr Joshua Issac, a Dalit activist, is happy that a new census has been released. He hopes that with the government having a clearer view of the statistics now, they’ll take more steps to uplift people belonging to lower castes.
However, C. Lakshmanan, professor at Madras Institute of Development Studies (MIDS), said it can’t be called a caste census data because he thinks that this census is going to rejuvenate the caste system instead of annihilating it.“All these statistics have been available for many years, it is repetitive. What we need is an alternate way to sort out the issue, this ‘communal’ census is only going to deepen the divide between these castes.”
S. Anandi, another professor of the institute, feels there has been no real breakdown of the castes in the census and that it seems very generic. She also points out that the female population of the country has been entirely ignored with regard to the number of lower caste women, “The census almost seems like lower caste women don’t figure in the census at all. There are statistics for houses headed by females, but what about their caste,” she asks.
