Breaking Barriers: Challenges Faced by SC/ST Children in India

In a country as diverse as India, every child deserves an equal shot at learning – yet for millions of children from Scheduled Caste (SC) and Scheduled Tribe (ST) communities, that shot is blocked at every turn. Poverty, discrimination, unfamiliar languages of instruction, and a school system that was never quite designed with them in mind: these are not abstract policy problems. They are the daily realities shaping whether a child walks into a classroom or drops out before finishing primary school. Together, SCs and STs account for nearly a quarter of India’s population – roughly 16% and 8% respectively – yet they remain among its most educationally marginalized groups. Understanding their specific challenges is the first step toward building schools that genuinely include them.

Historical roots of caste-based educational exclusion 🔗

The barriers SC and ST children face today did not appear overnight. They are rooted in centuries of caste hierarchy and social segregation. The practice of untouchability – which kept Dalit communities physically separated from mainstream society – meant that access to knowledge and formal schooling was historically denied to them. The isolation of Dalits was not merely physical; it was grounded in socio-cultural rules of purity and pollution, keeping them out of spaces – including schools – dominated by upper-caste groups.

The Indian Constitution took a decisive stand against this. Article 17 abolishes untouchability in any form, while Article 46 commits the state to promoting the educational and economic interests of SC, ST, and other weaker sections. Articles 15(4) and 45 further reinforce the state’s responsibility toward positive discrimination in education. Despite these constitutional protections, the ground reality has been far slower to change. Even after more than seven decades of independence, India continues to struggle against caste-based bias in education, and its effects are most visible in the lives of SC and ST children.

The spread of schooling in India has been a deeply politico-economic process, and the disparities in educational access are a direct consequence of massively unequal diffusion. The schooling system is organized in a pyramidal hierarchy: urban elite schools at the top, and rural schools in SC and ST habitations at the very bottom – with low-caste and tribal children disproportionately placed in the worst-resourced institutions.

Social and economic hurdles 🔗

For SC children in particular, poverty is both a cause and a consequence of educational exclusion. When a family’s income depends entirely on daily wages, a child in school means one fewer earning hand – and that tradeoff is often too costly to sustain. Most SC families rely on daily wages, and many remain burdened by debt incurred for basic needs like education and healthcare. The cycle is self-reinforcing: parents without education are less aware of their children’s rights or available scholarships, and children without support drop out early.

The numbers tell a stark story. While the general dropout rate for Classes VI to VIII in India stood at around 42%, the dropout rate for SC children at the same stage was significantly higher at over 51%. Gaps in enrollment persist as well, particularly for SC girls, where early marriage, the dowry system, and parental illiteracy all compound the problem. Girls’ enrollment in India is low, and dropout among SC girls is driven by early marriage, dowry pressures, and limited parental awareness about education.

Beyond economics, there is the weight of social discrimination inside classrooms themselves. SC children report being made to sit in the last row, excluded from classroom activities, and in some cases physically abused or assigned menial tasks by upper-caste teachers. Peer bullying by upper-caste classmates also discourages mixing and participation. These are not isolated incidents – they are patterns documented across states that make school an unwelcoming, even hostile, environment for Dalit children.

The language barrier in tribal education 🔗

For Scheduled Tribe children, the challenges in school carry an additional dimension: the language barrier. Most ST children arrive at school speaking a tribal mother tongue, only to find that instruction is delivered entirely in a dominant regional or state language they barely understand. Although access to schools has improved and enrollment rates are rising, dropout rates remain alarmingly high and achievement levels are low compared to non-tribal children – partly because education is conducted in a language they do not understand, using an unfamiliar cultural context.

This mismatch goes beyond mere inconvenience. Less than 1% of tribal children have access to education in their mother tongues, and the consequences are severe: approximately 80% of tribal students leave school before completing high school, a dropout rate that directly correlates with continued socioeconomic disadvantage. The problem runs even deeper: forcing children into education in a language they do not understand at the point of school entry leads not only to large-scale school failure, but also erodes their competence in their own mother tongue.

The curriculum compounds the alienation. For tribal learners, the language barrier comes bundled with a content barrier – the daily life experiences and culture of tribal children are virtually absent from textbooks and other curricular materials used in dominant-language schools. Teachers, too, are part of the problem. In states like Odisha, most teachers assigned to tribal schools do not come from the local community, are not fluent in the tribal language, and simply expect children to communicate in Odia – leaving tribal students stranded between two languages they are not yet comfortable with.

UNICEF has recognized this as a critical issue and supports state governments in Assam, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha, and Rajasthan to align educational materials with children’s linguistic backgrounds. A sociolinguistic mapping exercise in Chhattisgarh covering over 400,000 first-grade students identified 24 languages in use, including 11 spoken by tribal communities – a reminder of how diverse and overlooked the linguistic needs of these children are.

Case study: Mallanna’s story 🔗

Consider Mallanna, a ten-year-old boy from a small SC family in rural Telangana. His father works as an agricultural laborer, earning irregular daily wages. His mother, who never completed primary school, is unaware that her son is eligible for a pre-matric scholarship. Mallanna enrolled in Class I at the local government school, but by Class III, he had already begun missing school frequently – accompanying his father to the fields during harvest season.

Inside the classroom, Mallanna sat at the back. His teacher rarely called on him. When an upper-caste classmate refused to share a bench with him, the teacher said nothing. Mallanna’s family cannot afford the unofficial costs that come with schooling – notebooks, shoes, the occasional “donation” – and shame around these gaps keeps him increasingly on the periphery of school life. By Class V, Mallanna had dropped out.

Mallanna’s story is not an outlier. It reflects what researchers and government data have consistently documented: that SC children find it challenging to remain in school because of their socio-economic conditions, and because of a lack of awareness about the rights, scholarships, and reservations available to them. The reservation policy – designed precisely to help families like Mallanna’s – cannot benefit those who drop out before reaching higher education. Breaking this cycle requires intervention much earlier, at the primary school level itself.

Steps towards change 🔗

Significant policy attention has been directed at these problems, though implementation gaps remain wide. Several key initiatives deserve mention:

Constitutional and legal safeguards 🔗

The Right to Education Act (2009) guarantees free and compulsory education to all children aged 6-14, with specific provisions for disadvantaged groups. The RTE Act also stresses the use of the child’s mother tongue as the medium of instruction wherever feasible, a provision that is especially significant for ST children. The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 goes further, recommending mother-tongue-based instruction up to at least Class V, and ideally through Class VIII – with textbooks and reading materials to be developed in home languages.

Eklavya Model Residential Schools 🔗

The Eklavya Model Residential Schools (EMRS) initiative was launched in 1997-98 to provide quality education to ST children in remote areas, equipping them for higher education and professional careers. Unlike conventional schools, EMRS institutions integrate cultural preservation, sports, and skill development alongside academics. As of 2024, 728 EMRS schools have been sanctioned across the country, with 410 operational and serving over 128,000 students. The Union Budget 2023-24 announced the recruitment of 38,000 teachers and support staff to strengthen these schools. However, a Parliamentary Committee has noted that many EMRS schools suffer from poor infrastructure and inadequate teaching staff, pointing to the persistent gap between policy intent and on-ground execution.

Multilingual education programmes 🔗

On the language front, states like Odisha and Andhra Pradesh have been early movers. Andhra Pradesh launched mother tongue-based multilingual education (MLE) in 240 schools across eight tribal language communities in 2004, while Odisha began with 10 tribal languages and 195 schools. Crucially, teachers in these programmes come from the respective tribal communities and are fluent in both the tribal mother tongue and the state majority language – addressing the very teacher-community mismatch that drives so many children away. A multilingual education pilot in Jharkhand covering 259 schools, supported by UNICEF, produced such positive outcomes that the state government expanded it to 1,000 schools.

School-level and social reforms 🔗

Beyond formal policy, reform at the classroom level is equally necessary. Teacher training in culturally responsive and inclusive pedagogy, strict enforcement of anti-discrimination norms, and community engagement programmes that bring SC and ST parents into school governance are all critical levers. Research on SC/ST adolescent girls in Karnataka found that a supportive school and family environment, along with positive peer role models, were among the most significant enablers of girls staying in education. This underscores the point that structural change – better schools, better teachers, better policies – works best when it is reinforced by attitudinal change at the community level.

The Mid-Day Meal Scheme, too, has played a quiet but meaningful role: studies in Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan, and Karnataka found that the scheme had an immense positive impact on enrollment and attendance levels for largely impoverished SC/ST children – removing one concrete reason, classroom hunger, that kept children away from school.

Progress is real but uneven. In the 2020-21 academic year, enrollment of ST children in higher education grew by 11.9% – a positive sign, even as significant gaps in school-level retention persist. The challenge now is not simply to draft better policies, but to implement them with the consistency and accountability that will determine whether a child like Mallanna ever completes Class VIII.

What do you think? Given that language exclusion and classroom discrimination both push SC/ST children out of school, which of the two do you think demands more urgent attention – reforming what is taught, or transforming how teachers behave? And if you were designing a school specifically for tribal children, what would you prioritize first?

References

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