Situation of Unwed Mothers in Angul District – A Field perspective from select development blocks

Single mothers bear a social taboo, especially in rural India. One of the factors for such a situation is rapid transformation of micro economy thereby inviting outside population to cater to a particular set of activities to be performed whereas the host population is a passive service provider in an informal manner. Growing urbanization and industrialization as engine of economic growth have not addressed poverty and economic justice of vulnerable. Mining or extractive industries worldwide have given rise to satellite occupations but has also carried risks of cultural mismatch, residual economy, tempting changeover as cash economy prevails for few to lure people into false promises. Women are particularly vulnerable to such developments as they depend on family income and have lesser knowledge of cultural gaps owing to low transformation of awareness-education social structures. In order to understand the problem of single mothers, Angul, an industrial and coal mining area was chosen as a test case to analyze various facets, three of the contiguous blocks out of eight development blocks were chosen to understand the spread of problem where maximum field coverage was done.

The first section of the report briefly puts forward perspectives in terms of demographics, growth, industrialization and urbanization, workers and migration. Efforts were made to compile demography and other data at block level wherever possible due to paucity of detailed data at block level. This perspective puts in place a context in which one has to correlate the issue of single mother and reflect some basic findings upon similar issues in the mining and other industrials regions of the country.

Accused information has also been taken from the respondent and correctness of that information is entirely based on the information provided by the victim, in many cases, victims have no information or they do not know about certain parameters like casteof the accused, whether they have remarried or whether they carried any disease.

The second section deals with various socio-economic and spatial information about the victims, their children and the accused and provides several correlative scenarios which require a time tested and widely spread enumeration across the district which was not within the scope of this study. Several tables, maps are used to correlate and arrive at findings while analyzing different aspects of information collect through the survey.

In conclusion, brief pointers for a way ahead is presented. Read Report