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. |
