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ABSTRACT

The word Tel means oil (cooking oil) and Teli means person dealing with manufacture and sale of cooking oil in Urdu. The word Teli comes from Tel, which means oil in Marathi, Hindi, and Oriya languages. Traditionally, the Teli are an occupational caste of oil-pressers and the name Teli is given to them because of their profession of "Making Edible oil". In old times, these people had their small oil mills known as Kolhu or Ghana driven by blindfolded oxen around the mill to make or extract edible oil from oil seeds like mustered and sesame. Teli caste is one of the most backward classes (as per Mandal commission) in the Jammu region of Jammu And Kashmir State. Their plights were never heard or addressed even after more than six decades of independence due to underrepresentation in both the houses of state legislature. Hence the investigator felt the need to explore the area which is yet to be explored. In this way efforts were made to study various reasons behind the educational backwardness of the community and to suggest remedies to improve their educational conditions. The sample for the present study comprised of the 15 community representatives selected by following snowball non-random sampling technique. All the representatives were interviewed to deeply understand and analyse the factors responsible for the undertaken phenomenon and to suggest remedies for the same. Community representatives revealed number of social, economic, educational factors which are collectively responsible for the educational backwardness of the community and also suggested suitable solutions or remedies for the same.

Keywords: Education, Teli, community, caste, backwardness

Justice K. Subba Rao, former Chief Justice of India, defined 'backward classes' as "an ascertainable ; and identifiable group of persons based on caste, religion, race, language, occupation and such others, with definite characteristics of backwardness in various aspects of human existence- social, cultural, economic, political and such others." We can generally define 'backward classes' as those social groups or classes or castes which are characterized by lack of education, poverty, exploitation of labour, non-representation in services etc. In simple words, the term 'backward classes' can be defined as a social category which consists of all the socially, educationally, economically and politically backward groups, castes, and tribes. In the Indian...

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