Education is a dynamic and powerful tool for social and economic empowerment but its effectiveness largely depends on its spread and utilization. Despite of many constitutional provisions and efforts by government and civil society, a vast majority of population in India especially the Dalits have remained outside the education system. Apart from lack of access and quality expansion of education they also suffered from lack of social opportunities. The presence of acute social hierarchy and group discrimination has affected the progress of education at the social level. The spread of education has largely been confined to urban and developed rural territories. However, structural barriers like Hindu social order and caste based discrimination continue to deprive many Dalits from the benefit of education.
In the post independent India, one of the major objectives of education, especially after 1950 was to cater to the educational needs and development of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes children who have remained quite isolated from the ambit of education for centuries. It is only after independence; government started systematic efforts to raise educational standard of Dalits though the result has not been satisfactory in terms of its implementation and outcome. (Paswan and Jaideva, 2002:73). In this context it is pertinent to refer to Article 46 of Indian Constitution which states that “the state shall promote with special care the educational and economic interests of the weaker sections of the population Scheduled Cates particular, and shall protect them from social injustice and all forms of exploitation”. However, in reality the ruling caste and class adopted the modern values of old social order having the paradoxical hypocrisies. Moreover, the Dalits live in the dominated value system of Varna and caste.
In this backdrop, the purpose of this paper is to highlights educational condition of Dalits in India, vis-à-vis enrolment of SC students in primary level to higher education including professional education and how it has integrated Dalits into mainstream society. Besides this a modest attempt is being made to highlight the causes of educational backwardness of the Dalits and barriers that has been responsible for the relatively slow rate of progress. The paper, also suggest few measure to ameliorate the educational accessibility of Dalits.
keywords: education, dalits, strutural barrier.
B.B. Malik (2010) BARRIERS TO LEARNING: DALITS IN POST-INDEPENDENT INDIA, ICERI2010 Proceedings, pp. 409-416.