Assistant Regional Director,
The Dalits are considered not only impure in terms of their occupations, their very existence, their dwellings, their movements and even their fall of shadow creates a state of impurity among all the upper castes throughout the country. As a consequence, these castes have remained socially, economically, culturally and educationally backward for several centuries. Due to the inhuman and ruthless practice of untouchablity by caste Hindus, dalits thought that unless they desert that exploitative order, there was no liberation for them. Then they started movement against the inhuman and antagonistic baseless caste system. The protest movements took strong roots in the nineteenth century, which is mostly concentrated on social issues than economic issues as social discrimination is most important. The movements, which were taken up related to the economic issues may not be neglesable, it also created awareness among the common people about the economic inequalities and the importance of land in the agrarian society. Keeping in the view of these mariganalised and vulnerable castes status, since Independence, several welfare programmes, progressive legislations and constitutional safeguards were enacted and implemented in India in favour of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. But the vision of constitution and Indian democracy has not been realized even after 67 years of independence. In this context, in this paper an attempt has been made to analyses i) Socio-economic status of Dalits in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana with selected human development parameters ii) Dalit access to land in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana during post independence period iii) It also examines the implementation of landreforms and its impact on Dalits land ownership in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. This paper is divided into two parts, first part analyses the status of Dalits with reference to population, demography, education and health. The second part analyses the land distribution pattern among different social groups and the implementation of landreforms with the help of primary data (case studies)
Dalits, Economic Inequality, Health, Education, Skewed Land Distribution, Landreforms
