What are the definitional problems involved in identifying tribes in India? Discuss the main obstacles to tribal development in India. (2024)
The Constitution names Scheduled Tribes but never defines a tribe: Article 366(25) says only that STs are those notified under Article 342. India thus administers 10.43 crore people, 8.6% of the population, in 705 notified communities (Census 2011) through a category it has never conceptually fixed — and that unsettled definition shapes why tribal development keeps failing.
A borrowed concept that travels badly
The term comes from nineteenth-century evolutionary anthropology, where Lewis Henry Morgan treated tribe as a stage of evolution; India’s STs span band (Birhor, Onge), segmentary lineage (Munda, Santhal) and chiefdom (Naga, Gond kingdoms) at once. Unlike settler societies, where the tribal/non-tribal line is sharp, in India jana and jati have coexisted at fluctuating margins since recorded history — which is why André Béteille (The Concept of Tribe with Special Reference to India, 1986) held that tribe here is definable only negatively, by distance from the caste-peasant civilisation around it.
Every diagnostic trait fails somewhere
Isolation collapses for the Bhil and Meena; animism, where Santhal and Gond deities are enumerated as Hindu; egalitarianism, for the ranked Toda and for Munda landlords; language, since the Bhils speak the regional Indo-Aryan tongue. F. G. Bailey, from Bisipara in Odisha (Tribe, Caste and Nation, 1960), made the failure productive: tribe and caste are two ends of one continuum, the variable being direct access to land. N. K. Bose (The Hindu Method of Tribal Absorption, 1941) showed absorption through a guaranteed occupational niche, Surajit Sinha the reverse route among the Bhumij; G. S. Ghurye (The Aborigines So-Called and Their Future, 1943) read it all as proof that tribes are only “backward Hindus“.
An administrative category, contested politically
Scheduling runs on the Lokur Committee (1965) tests — primitive traits, distinctive culture, geographical isolation, shyness of contact, backwardness — none of them constitutional. The Xaxa Committee (2014), chaired by Virginius Xaxa, called them obsolete and pejorative: “primitive” and “shyness of contact” record a colonial gaze, not a society. Since scheduling carries reservation, land protection and Fifth Schedule cover, the list becomes an object of politics — the Meitei claim in Manipur, where a High Court direction of March 2023 was deleted in February 2024 after the violence it helped trigger.
Obstacles to tribal development
- Land and forest. Colonial forest law turned customary rights into state-granted privileges, and alienation to the diku persists. Under the Forest Rights Act, 2006, of 44.33 lakh claims disposed by 31 December 2025, 18.90 lakh (36.4%) were rejected, and Community Forest Resource rights remain its least granted provision.
- Displacement. The Xaxa Committee estimated that about 40% of those displaced by dams are Scheduled Tribes. PESA, 1996 gives the Gram Sabha consultation, not consent; only at Niyamgiri (2013) has a gram sabha veto actually operated.
- Human development. The same report found 45.3% of STs below the poverty line (2011-12) and dropout near 73% by Class X; ST literacy was 58.96% against 72.99% nationally.
- Institutional failure. Tribes Advisory Councils are moribund and the Governor’s Fifth Schedule powers unused. Big recent outlays — PM-JANMAN (2023) for the 75 PVTGs, Dharti Aaba Janjatiya Gram Utkarsh Abhiyan (2024) — address scale, but the deficit is delivery, not design.
- Internal inequality. State of Punjab v. Davinder Singh (2024) permitted sub-classification within STs and urged a creamy layer, conceding that better-placed tribes capture a disproportionate share.
Conclusion
Definition and development are one problem. A category built on isolation and primitiveness yields policy that either museumises tribes or dissolves them, missing the fact that tribal disadvantage is now a relation to land, forest and the state. Redefining the Scheduled Tribe around distinctive social organisation and historic dispossession, as Xaxa urged, is the precondition of development that works.