Republic of India Livelihoods in intermediate towns
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- Table 24: Education Qualifications of Different Categories of Respondents
9.5: Caste, Education and Aspirations: The story of aspiration is also a story of caste. It is not without the promise of social networks and social capital that one can hope to fulfill aspirations, both of which are determined to a large extent by one’s location in the caste hierarchy.It clearly emerges from our field interviews and the survey that higher educational achievement was closely tied with traditionally upper castes, which in turn makes them eligible for higher paid skill-based jobs in the contemporary job market. As we can see in the Table 24, as many as 44 percent of those who reported having received no formal education were members of the scheduled castes followed by Muslims at nearly 21 percent, which precludes them from white collar jobs or jobs in the contemporary service sector. On the other hand, 44 percent of those who reported having acquired education until the graduate level and beyond belonged to the traditional upper castes in both the settlements. According to Ajay Kumar Jha, a young principal of the Parvati Progressive School, a private school in Bhagwatipur, children of the agrani (forward) castes do not attend school in the village, most of them can afford to seek education outside Bhagwatipur and do so.
S. K. Jha, a forty eight year old Brahmin is the local homeopathy doctor (BHMS) in Satghara. He also has a PhD degree in Maithili language. His father was the headmaster of an upper primary government school in Satghara. Of the other two brothers he has, one works in a bank in Bokaro in the Bokaro Steel Industry and the other worked in Delhi before he moved back to Satghara to take care of the 15 acres of land the three brothers own. The disenchantment of the young from agriculture, across India is widely documented, whether by economists in terms of labour force participation, by sociologists and anthropologists in terms of the interaction of gender and generation and processes of localization and globalization or by policy makers who are facing the dilemma of employment generation for such a significant shift away from the agricultural sector (see Section 2 above). Mehta (2014) in her ethnographic study of peri-urbanization in Uttarakhand states of the current young generation that, ‘this is a generation whose educational qualifications, employment trajectories and, above all, aspirations for the kinds of lives they would like to live that has moved them far out of the orbit of anything their elders might ever have envisaged’ (Mehta 2014:2). The promise of education has also contributed to a culture of aspirational livelihoods in the region. However the material limitations of resources, of access and of relevant networks create a simultaneous sense of despondency with education. A Registered Medical Practitioner (RMP) in Satghara put it thus: Previously, it was an agriculture-dominated economy over here. Nearly 90 percent of the people here practiced agriculture in Satghara. Until fifteen to twenty years ago, even we were dependent upon agriculture, my father also used to practice agriculture. Now, once we started getting (educationally) qualified, it was difficult since our father didn’t have enough resources to send us out of Madhubhani. So we had to manage within our limited resources, I first finished doing my high school, and then inter, then a B.A. and finally a M.A. – sometimes of our own and sometimes with my father’s support – I persisted. I left my job within the army as I didn’t have the 50,000 I needed to relocate etc. I finally obtained a RMP certificate and got a license, here from the Madhubani office. A shopkeeper in Satghara who also gives out land for sharecropping informed us that he had been facing a shortage of labour to hire for agriculture. According to him: We are facing a strange situation. How can we continue practicing agriculture? I am soon going to be sixty. I should retire. Normally the next generation should take it up. However, my children have studied outside. They have worn pants all their life. How can they work on land? People will laugh at them. We cannot here. There is not decent labourer left here. This is also a story of the overall decline of agriculture, which we have discussed earlier (see Section 4). Yüklə 2,26 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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