Abstract
The Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribe together constitute about 25% of the country's population, and are historically two most dis-advantaged sections of the Indian Society. Further, people belonging to the SCs and STs, particularly those living in the rural areas continue to suffer from the same age-old caste prejudices, exclusion and discrimination in almost all spheres of socio-economic life, and therefore, an overwhelmingly large majority of them lag behind the other social groups with respect to almost all indicators of development such as literactj, employment, health-care, sanitation, life-expectancy, housing and so on. To compound these economic hardships, these communities continue to be the victims of thousands of atrocities of various kinds in different parts of the countnry.
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