Socio-economic background and educational achievements of scheduled castes students in J&K

Education is considered as a potential instrument of individual development as social upliftment. Those who have remained backward and underprivileged over years can be empowered by education to assert their rights and to fulfil their rightful places in the society. Education is also found to be a powerful means of removing disparities, discrimination and disabilities in the society but at the same time socio-economic factors are influencing education to a great extent and stand on the way of realizing the constitutional objectives as well as scholastic and vocational goals. Keeping these in view the present study is planned with following objectives like identification of actors determining the socio-economic background etc. As per the objectives of the study, data is collected from students. The procedure adopted in the selection of the sample is "stratified random sampling", which is done at four levels i.e districts, tehsils, villages and respondents. So in this way, we have derived 405 scheduled castes college students for our study. This study indicates that the academically poor scheduled caste students belonged to low socio-economic status followed by those students who are from middle socio-economic status. Very limited academically poor scheduled caste students belonged to high socio economic status. It means, lower the socio-economic status of the students poorer is their academic performance. Lack of facilities, poor parental education and less supportive environment adversely affect the academic performance of the students.