Problem of Drop out among the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in India: An analysis on the basis of Secondary Data

While progress in improving literacy in India has been remarkable, the phenomenon of school dropouts has remained a blot in the face of an otherwise commendable performance.Dropout rates have undoubtedly come down but are still high enough for us to sit up and take notice.Since dropping out is a worldwide phenomenon, the issue has been the subject of intense analysis and factors influencing such an outcome have been widely discussed. However, not much is known on how these factors play themselves in most dispvivilaged groups like Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes of our country. Reducing drop out is central to improving access to basic education. Most of those who do not attend school are children who have enrolled but who have crossed the threshold from regular attendance to regular absence. In most countries especially in India the numbers excluded this way are much greater than those who never attend school. In low enrolment systems more than half the children who start primary schooling will fail to complete it successfully. So, looking all these problems in our education system an attempt has made in this paper to explores factors associated with high dropout rate of SC and ST students from Indian education which lie at the individual, household, school and community level and maps how some of them interact. This paper looks at the data on school 'dropouts' in India to understand the factors responsible for children being pushed out of schools. It unpicks some of the frequently advanced explanations for dropouts such as poverty, quality of education, lack of interest in education and examination failure. It locates the explanation in terms of an absence of the social norm which promotes a child's right to education, as well as the often -hostile administrative practices and procedures adopted by schools. It is found that their high dropout rate is the result of a process rather than a single event, has more than one proximate cause, and is fairly irreversible. This paper has outlined a range of factors which causes dropping out from the school education among this section of population. It argues that drop out from school can rarely be put down to one event or one impact. There are a lot of socioeconomic causes of their drop out.