Peer Interaction, Exclusion and School Participation: Issues of Schooling in a Tribal Village of Odisha

In India, drop-outs and out-of-school children in school education are dominant educational discourses even after seven decades of independence. No doubt, various policies and programmes were devised to challenge these issues in education, but still the issues of drop-outs are rampant both in rural and urban areas. The inequality in educational attainment between Scheduled Tribes and the rest of the population has widened throughout the years. Various social aspects of why children leave school before they complete the secondary level of school are understudied in India. Aspects of cultural and social practices and patterns of socialization of tribal children have received little attention in the research on tribal children in India. By specially focussing on friendship networks/peer interaction, the article reflects on how it affects educational participation of tribal and non-tribal children in a village located in the tribal areas of Odisha, one of the eastern states of India.