Social Groups

Most of the families belong to the scheduled castes (76 %) is evident from Fig. 2. The households belonging to Scheduled Tribes, Other Backward Castes and others comprise only 6 % of the total study participants. About 16 families did not report caste on account of their following religion other than Hinduism. However, the follow-up visits, discussions and observations suggested that they were Dalit Muslims (3), OBC Muslims (9) and Dalit Christians (4).

Household Income and Occupation

As regards the income quintiles, the households are fairly and evenly distributed with about 17 % falling in each quintile (Table 2). It is only in the third quintile that there are 18.2 % households. About 13 % households reported no income. These were the households which were established separately to claim rights on the land and the dwelling unit. For all practical purposes they were attached to their ‘parents’ household. It was also reported that many of them were using the housing unit for the purpose of sleeping only. Thus, labelling them as families was more appropriate than households.

The main occupation of the household respondent is regular employment in private sector (9.1 %) followed by casual labour in nonagricultural other than public work (4.5 %). Closely following is the regular employment in public sector and traditional service occupations such as shoe making/mending, washing and

Table 2 Income quintile and their distribution

Source prepared from the primary data collected from the study site (authors own source)

Table 3 Main occupation of the household

Source prepared from the primary data collected from the study site (authors own source)

ironing clothes, and hair cutting/styling; which is offering work to less than 4 %. Other works like self-employment, domestic work engages very small share of the households’ members of the study (Table 3).