‘Uneven development is the major source of tribal unrest in India’. Examine the statement in relation to the movements in tribal India. (1991)
Uneven development names a mechanism: growth that draws resources out of a region while leaving its people poorer. Tested against actual movements it explains middle India’s mineral belt well and the north-east badly, which suggests it identifies the location of tribal movements more reliably than their cause.
The thesis: internal colonialism
Michael Hechter (Internal Colonialism, 1975) described a cultural division of labour in which a peripheral group is confined to subordinate roles while its resources finance the core, ethnic solidarity being the periphery’s answer. India’s Fifth Schedule districts fit — they hold much of the country’s coal, iron ore and bauxite, and some of its poorest people. Scheduled Tribes are 8.6 per cent of Indians (Census 2011) but, on the Xaxa Committee (2014) estimate, about 40 per cent of those displaced by dams.
Movements that fit
- Jharkhand. Chotanagpur was industrialised early — Jamshedpur from 1907, then Bokaro and Rourkela — on land taken from Adivasi cultivators. K. S. Singh described the movement’s passage “from ethnicity to regionalism”. Statehood came in 2000, but Scheduled Tribes are only about a quarter of Jharkhand’s population: a tribal homeland became a state without becoming tribally governed.
- Narmada Bachao Andolan (from 1985) mobilised submergence-affected Bhilalas. Amita Baviskar (In the Belly of the River, 1995) cautioned that the movement’s ecological frame was not always its tribal base’s priority — which was land and livelihood.
- Koel-Karo. Munda villages resisted the hydel project for three decades; after police firing at Tapkara in February 2001 killed eight, the project was abandoned.
- Niyamgiri. In Orissa Mining Corporation v. Ministry of Environment and Forests (2013) twelve Dongria Kondh gram sabhas rejected bauxite mining.
- Pathalgadi (2017–18). Khunti villages erected stone slabs asserting gram sabha sovereignty.
- Left-wing extremism mapped almost exactly onto this belt. Its retreat is equally instructive: affected districts fell from 126 in 2018 to 8 in December 2025, an outcome of security operations rather than redistribution.
Where the thesis under-explains
- The north-east. Naga, Mizo, Bodo and Kuki-Zo movements turn on homeland, migration and recognition rather than mineral extraction. Assam’s agitation targeted migrants — competition for modern-sector jobs, as Myron Weiner (Sons of the Soil, 1978) showed, not resource drain.
- Absence where the thesis predicts presence. Many Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups and most southern tribes are acutely underdeveloped yet produce no movements. L. K. Mahapatra observed that movements arise among numerically strong, settled, better-off tribes — the opposite of what deprivation alone predicts.
- Who leads. Movements are organised by an educated tribal middle class created by reservation and schooling, not by the displaced poor — a differentiation now constitutionalised by State of Punjab v. Davinder Singh (2024), which permitted sub-classification within Scheduled Castes and Tribes.
- Recognition is an independent source. The Manipur violence from 3 May 2023, triggered by a claim to Scheduled Tribe status, owed nothing to extraction.
Conclusion
Uneven development is the major source of tribal unrest in the mineral heartland and a weak one elsewhere. It supplies the strain; territorial concentration, organised leadership and a contested identity decide whether a movement follows. The thesis is best kept not as a general law but as the political economy half of an explanation whose other half is recognition.