Food_Insecurity_in_India.PDF (original) (raw)

Indian society is highly stratified on caste lines, with the national Constitution recognizing indigenous tribes and four broad caste types. The lowest of these, ‘Scheduled Castes’, account for 16.5 percent of the population, and ‘Scheduled Tribes’ for 8 percent, but both together represent 42 percent of the poor. Affirmative action for these categories and for women (such as the ‘reservation’ of a proportion of seats on elected bodies), whilst potentially pro-poor, is conceptually and operationally distinct from the range of other poverty and food security focused measures taken by government.