Literacy Gap of SC community in TN districts

I was going through the Census 2011 data once again and Erode district’s low Schedule Caste (SC) literacy rate caught my eyes. It is not a very lagging state when in overall literacy. But its SC literacy was less than the least literate district of Dharmapuri. So I added the data to the TN Districts shapefile and visualised it to see how lagging are the SC community across the districts.

Here are the maps

Correction

In an earlier map, the gap of Thoothukudi was mentioned as -14%, while the actual gap is around 6% due to a typo during the data processing. The map has been updated to reflect the change.

My observations

1. Kongu Belt (Coimbatore, Tiruppur, Erode) is the worst. ~~The Gounder (land owning) community has ensured their position and the social ladder and ensured the peasantry remained uneducated and illiterate.~~

Update: While there might be an element of truth to it, the maps alone are not indicative of the inference. I have made the above observation based on the number of issue that have appeared on the media like the Mid-day meal staff harassment, two tumbler system etc.,

1. Dharmapuri is a peculiar case, it has the lowest overall literacy in TN, but it is also the only district where SC community is more literate than the general population.
2. Kanniyakumari which tops the overall literacy rates also tops the SC literacy. In fact the SC community of Kanniyakumari is more literate than the general population of almost all other districts. I think it would be an interesting place of humanities research in the area of literacy, education and caste.

Data Source:

http://www.tn.gov.in/deptst/areaandpopulation.pdf