Out of roughly 3000 ‘Castes’ estimated to exist in India, as many as 779 have been designated, as per Article 341 of the Constitution of India, as Scheduled Castes who occupy the lowest rank in the ritual hierarchy of Indian society and constitute bulk of agricultural labourers with minucule land holdings. As per 1991 Census Schedule Caste persons total 32,50,933 constituting 19.75 per cent of the total population of Haryana, an agriculturally dynamic state of the Republic of India. Over the successive Five Year Plan, the Government of India has evolved a battery of Policies and Programmes for the uplift, welfare and development of the Scheduled Castes and the Haryana Government has also taken complementary steps including the establishment of Haryana Harijan Kalyan Nigam is 1971 under the companies Act, 1956. The study highlights the socio-economic conditions of Schedule Castes in Haryana focussing on 770 respondents (out of which 400 are ‘beneficiaries’ of the government schemes and 370 ‘non beneficiaries’) selected from eight sampled villages in the districts, Ambala and Hisar of Haryana. The findings of the field study suggest that the diverse government programmes have certainly helped to revive the economic status of the beneficiaries and raised the consciousness of the beneficiaries as well as non-beneficiaries even though none of the beneficiaries has been risen significantly above the poverty line. The positive assessment of the impact of government programmes for development of Schedule Castes and the detailed description and analysis of the state-level administrative machinery makes the book meaningful for policy-makers and students of Public Administration in India.
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