Tribal Land Alienation and Poverty in Tamil Nadu

Abstract

Poverty is defined as material deprivation, isolation, dependence, land alienation, and insecurity . Access to land is of fundamental importance in rural India. The incidence of poverty is highly correlated with lack of access to land, although the direction of causality in this relationship is not clear . Economically the tribes are the weakest section in the social hierarchy, so their poverty level too is high among these sections. Land is the only tangible asset which the members of the scheduled tribes possess. Their income exclusively depends upon the size of land holdings. Hence, any loss of land not only reduces their income but also increases their poverty level. In this context, the present paper tries to identify the relationship between land alienation and the level of poverty and found that there has been severity of poverty in all the villages where the magnitude of land alienation is high.