Analyse critically the Government of India’s tribal policy. (1998)
The Government of India’s tribal policy runs as two policies at once. Declared, it is protective and pluralist, resting on Jawaharlal Nehru‘s tribal Panchsheel and an elaborate constitutional architecture. Practised, the same state is the largest single acquirer of tribal land — not hypocrisy, but a structural split between the welfare arm and the developmental arm of one state.
The declared policy
- Nehru’s Panchsheel (foreword to the second edition of Verrier Elwin‘s A Philosophy for NEFA, 1959): develop along the lines of the people’s own genius; respect rights in land and forest; staff administration with their own people; do not over-administer; judge results by human character evolved, not money spent.
- Article 342 notifies the lists — 705 communities, 8.6% of the population in Census 2011, 117 more added between 2014 and 2024.
- Article 244 with the Fifth Schedule (Governor’s regulation-making power, Tribes Advisory Councils) and the Sixth Schedule (autonomous district councils with legislative powers in the Northeast).
- Article 275(1) grants-in-aid; reservation under Articles 330 and 332; services under Article 335; the National Commission for Scheduled Tribes under Article 338A; and Article 339, empowering the Union to direct a state on tribal welfare.
The practice of the developmental state
Displacement in these decades was concentrated where minerals and river valleys are — which is where tribes are. Walter Fernandes estimates over 60 million people displaced or project-affected between 1947 and 2000, Scheduled Tribes more than 40% of them.
- Acquisition ran for a century on the Land Acquisition Act, 1894 without consent. The Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013 required consent, social impact assessment and Fifth Schedule safeguards, but exempted large categories of project and has been diluted by state amendments.
- Samatha v. State of Andhra Pradesh (1997) barred transfer of Scheduled Area land to private mining companies; the response was to work around the ruling, not extend it.
- The Forest (Conservation) Amendment Act, 2023 narrowed “forest” to recorded forest land, until the Supreme Court in February 2024 directed states to keep applying the wider T. N. Godavarman understanding.
- Compensatory afforestation is routinely raised on village commons and land under community forest claims: forest lost to industry returns as plantations that extinguish tribal use.
- The protective powers are least used: the Governor’s Fifth Schedule authority, Tribes Advisory Councils and Article 339(2) directions remain largely dormant.
Why the contradiction is structural
Protection and development sit in different parts of the state: the Ministry of Tribal Affairs (1999) is a nodal welfare ministry, while the decisions that determine tribal futures are taken in the mines, environment, power and industry ministries, where it has no veto. A. R. Desai‘s reading of the Indian state as guarding propertied interests explains the asymmetry; Virginius Xaxa explains its ideology — policy defines the tribal problem as backwardness rather than dispossession, so the remedy is delivery (₹1,27,434 crore under the Scheduled Tribe Component in 2025–26), which never contradicts extraction.
Conclusion
The policy is generous in recognition and thin in power: it enlarges lists, budgets and schemes while keeping land, forest and mineral decisions outside tribal hands, so the protective Schedules work partly as legitimation. Judged by Nehru’s own fifth principle — results measured by human character, not money spent — the state is failing its own test.