Write short note : Migration and tribal communities. (2004)
Tribes are popularly imagined as immobile forest dwellers, yet Adivasis have been among India’s most migrated populations for almost two centuries. The distinguishing feature is not movement but its compulsion: tribal migration has typically been recruited, indebted or displaced rather than chosen, and it therefore transfers labour outward while leaving rights behind.
The colonial stream: recruitment and indenture
- Land settlements and the 1860s tea boom made Chotanagpur a labour catchment. Between 1877 and 1929 some 4,19,841 indentured recruits entered Assam, Munda, Oraon, Santhal and Kharia among them. Their descendants — the “tea tribes”, roughly seven million strong — are Scheduled Tribes in Jharkhand and Odisha but only Other Backward Classes in Assam, a status they have contested for decades.
- Parallel streams carried Adivasi and low-caste labour overseas under indenture to Mauritius, Fiji and the Caribbean, and convict settlements to the Andamans, where in-migration altered the ecology of the islands’ own tribes.
- Migration was thus itself a colonial technology — the obverse of the Santhal hul (1855) and the Munda ulgulan: those who could not fight the diku left.
The contemporary stream: circular and distress migration
- The Tribal Health in India report of the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (2018) found, from Census 2011, that about 55% of India’s 10.4 crore tribal population lives outside tribal-majority blocks, and that ST cultivators fell by roughly ten percentage points between 2001 and 2011 as agricultural labourers rose.
- In western Odisha — Balangir, Nuapada, Kalahandi — the dadan system advances a lump sum in September–October against six to eight months of family labour in brick kilns in Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Tamil Nadu. It is debt bondage in the form of a wage contract.
- Construction, stone quarries, mining and domestic service absorb the rest. The Periodic Labour Force Survey put India’s migration rate at 28.9% in July 2020–June 2021, employment the leading male reason and marriage 86.8% of female migration — a coding that conceals women who migrate to work.
Gender, trafficking and what migration costs
- Recruitment of tribal girls from Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Odisha into metropolitan domestic work through unregulated placement agencies has made trafficking a recognised policy problem, met by state placement-agency regulation and rescue operations.
- Migrants lose ST entitlements outside their home state, since scheduling is state-specific; they fall outside the public distribution system and lose gram sabha voice under PESA, 1996 and the Forest Rights Act, 2006 at home.
- Remittances do sustain households and finance land redemption and schooling, so migration is not simply loss: Virginius Xaxa notes that tribes change livelihood without ceasing to be tribes.
- The reverse migration of 2020 made the invisibility visible: the government told Parliament that over one crore migrant workers returned to their home states between March and June 2020, tribal districts of Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Odisha receiving large numbers with no work to absorb them.
Conclusion
Tribal migration is best read not as movement out of tradition but as the export of cheap labour from resource-rich, entitlement-poor regions. Until rights travel with the migrant — portable ration, registered contracts, enforceable minimum wages — migration will continue to integrate Adivasis into the national economy on the worst available terms.