Employment and Socio-Economic Status of Scheduled Caste Population in West Bengal

Employment determines the social and economic conditions of livelihood. It provides information about the human resources and the nature and extent of their utilization. Development may be imply an improvement in the material and cultural wellbeing of the people. The socio-economic development of any region is mainly based on the level of education, degree of employment and structure of employment. The present paper is an attempt to analyze employment opportunities for scheduled castes (SC) population, the extent in the levels of socio-economic development and the relationship between employment and level of development in West Bengal. The entire work is based upon the secondary sources of data and to reach standardization, the raw data computed into standard scores (Z-score). This way it is a linear transformation of the original data. The study finds that the low grades of socio-economic development are generally observed in the northern part of the state. It is generally observed that the level of socio-economic development varies considerably across the districts of the state and such disparities are caused by a range of social and economic factors like, literacy rate, educational facilities, health facilities, urbanization, agricultural development, industrial development and other infrastructural facilities. Finally, the paper concludes with some suggestive remarks to minimize the gap between employment rate and the level of socio-economic development among the districts of the state.