MANGALORE: Only 2.9% of dalit families surveyed by the Centre for Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy (CSEIP), Mangalore University, in the state as part of a three-year sponsored research programme by ICSSR are categorized as APL families.

Families without any ration cards are found around 4.1%. Households that come under the below poverty line are around 93% and the percentage of households having BPL cards is 76.9.

Other Antyodaya card holders are 15.5 per cent and Annapoorna card holders are 0.5 per cent. All these card holders are classified as poor families and accordingly, different types of BPL cards are given to these families.

These are the findings revealed in the study titled 'Discrimination and social exclusion: A study on the development experience of dalits in Karnataka', an executive summary of which was released at a national seminar here recently. Major source of income to dalit families is labour wage, mainly agriculture labour. Around 48% of income is from agricultural wage. The percentage of income from government salary source is 24.59%, and private sector contributes 7.18%. Other contribution is from self-employment (6.09%), agriculture (10.97%) and livestock (2.66%). If the income of the government and private sector employees is excluded, the scenario is entirely different.

Nearly 70.38% of the income to rural dalit families in the state is mainly from agricultural wage and 16.08% of income is from agriculture or cultivation. The source of income from self-employment is only 8.93 per cent. The access to employment and income to dalits is very much limited and caste discrimination prevents them access or restricts/prohibits them to enter other sectors of employment and income generation.

This shows that the caste discrimination is mainly responsible for strengthening the process of social exclusion of dalits in the rural Karnataka. Only 5.8% of the rural dalit households have government employees and in around 7.7% families have employees working in private sector.

The reservation in government jobs for dalits is a constitutional provision but its access is also limited in case of rural dalits in the state, the study observes.

The families who have got and not got at least one government/private employee in their families is classified as households with and without government/private employee and average per capita is separately calculated for them.

The families with land and without land also calculated. The per capita income of such families is only current income not adjusted with price movement or rate of inflation and it refers particular year.

