Why have we started using another category of tribes called the Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTGs)? Why are they so called? (2017)
The category exists because the Scheduled Tribe list is not internally homogeneous. Treated as a single administrative block, STs let the better-placed tribes absorb most of the benefit while a minority of very small groups kept declining. PVTG is the state’s admission of stratification within a protected category.
Why a sub-category was created
- The Scheduled Areas and Scheduled Tribes Commission (1960–61) under U. N. Dhebar found sharp inequality of development among Scheduled Tribes and recommended that the least developed be treated separately.
- Acting on this, the category Primitive Tribal Group was introduced in 1975, with 52 groups identified; further additions took the number to 75 by 1993, across 18 states and one Union Territory, where it has been frozen since.
- The four identification criteria were: a pre-agricultural level of technology (hunting, gathering, shifting cultivation), stagnant or declining population, extremely low literacy, and a subsistence-level economy. Examples include the Jarawa, Onge, Great Andamanese and Shompen of the islands, and the Birhor, Baiga, Saharia, Katkari and Cholanaickan on the mainland.
Why “particularly vulnerable”
The label was changed from “primitive” to “particularly vulnerable” in 2006. “Primitive” carried the evolutionist assumption that these communities occupy an earlier rung of a universal ladder — a unilinear scheme anthropology had long abandoned, and a slur in everyday use. “Particularly vulnerable” relocates the problem from the group’s supposed cultural stage to its relative position: vulnerability is measured against other STs, produced by shrinking forest access, epidemic exposure and infrastructure, not by an inherent condition. The current instrument, PM-JANMAN, launched 15 November 2023 with an outlay of ₹24,104 crore, targets exactly these 75 groups.
The sociological critique
- Virginius Xaxa has argued that such criteria reproduce the discredited Lokur Committee (1965) markers of “primitive traits” and “backwardness”; the new name softens the vocabulary without changing the evolutionist yardstick.
- The list is frozen and uneven — the same community counts as a PVTG in one state and not in a neighbouring one, and some deserving groups were never enumerated.
- Protection can slide into museumisation. The Great Nicobar project, cleared in Shompen habitat with consent routed through a Tribal Council rather than the community, shows that special vulnerability can be invoked to justify managing a people while their habitat is transferred.
Conclusion
PVTG is a necessary corrective to the fiction that Scheduled Tribes are one undifferentiated population. But its criteria describe the symptoms of dispossession as if they were traits of a people. It will do its work only when vulnerability is read as a relation to the state and market, and answered by secure rights over habitat.