Critically examine various tribal policies. Which tribal policy would you advocate for tribal development in India any way? (2000)
Indian tribal policy has moved through four positions: isolation, assimilation, integration and rights-based self-governance. The first three treat the tribe as an object and differ only on how much contact is good for it; only the fourth treats tribes as political subjects, and it alone fits the evidence.
Isolation
Verrier Elwin, in The Loss of Nerve (1941), urged protected “national parks” where tribal culture could recover from contact, since traders, moneylenders and missionaries had reduced tribes to landless labour. The diagnosis was accurate, the prescription was not: isolation freezes a living culture, denies schooling, health care and the franchise, and is impossible once roads, markets and the state arrive. G. S. Ghurye attacked it as keeping tribes as anthropological specimens.
Assimilation
Ghurye (The Aborigines — “So-Called” — and Their Future, 1943) held that tribes were “backward Hindus”, absorbed into the Hindu fold in degrees; Nirmal Kumar Bose‘s “Hindu method of tribal absorption” described the same process. The critique is twofold: absorption was selective, and absorbed groups usually entered at the bottom of the caste order; normatively it makes cultural surrender the price of citizenship. It also cannot explain the Northeast, where assimilation was resisted outright.
Integration and the welfare-transfer model
Jawaharlal Nehru‘s tribal Panchsheel (foreword to the second edition of Elwin’s A Philosophy for NEFA, 1959) sought a middle path: development along the people’s own genius, respect for rights in land and forest, tribal personnel, light administration, results judged by human character not money spent. In practice integration became transfer — blocks, the Tribal Sub-Plan (1974–75), now the Scheduled Tribe Component across 41 ministries — delivering schools and roads while land, forest and mineral decisions stayed with the state. Outlays rose; displacement continued.
The policy I would advocate: rights-based self-governance
The defensible position is autonomy with rights, neither protection nor delivery:
- PESA, 1996 makes the gram sabha in Scheduled Areas competent over minor minerals, minor forest produce, land alienation and development plans.
- The Forest Rights Act, 2006 recognises individual and, crucially, community forest resource rights, converting encroachers into right-holders.
- Orissa Mining Corporation v. Ministry of Environment and Forests (2013), the Niyamgiri case, made gram sabha consent decisive on claims to habitat: the Dongria Kondh gram sabhas voted the bauxite project down.
- Where feasible, Sixth Schedule-style autonomous councils give legislative, not merely consultative, power.
The case is sociological: tribal identity today, as Virginius Xaxa argues, is forged in the encounter with state and market rather than inherited intact, and what tribes need is bargaining power inside it.
Limits of my own position
Gram sabhas can be captured by local elites and by men, since customary bodies rarely seat women. Consent can be manufactured: the Great Nicobar clearance was routed through a Tribal Council rather than the affected communities. Rules lag: Jharkhand framed PESA rules only in January 2026 and Odisha has not. Only 1.21 lakh community forest titles exist against 23.88 lakh individual ones, and the Forest (Conservation) Amendment Act, 2023 reopened diversion routes.
Conclusion
Isolation preserves without empowering, assimilation empowers by erasing, integration-as-welfare delivers without transferring power. Only a rights-based, self-governing model makes tribes parties to their own development — provided gram sabha consent is treated as a veto rather than a formality.