Tribal Administration in India: History, Policies, Sub-Plan and DAPST

Anthropology Optional › Paper II › Unit 09: Tribal Administration and Development

9.1 History of administration of tribal areas, tribal policies, plans, programmes of tribal development and their implementation. The concept of PTGs (Primitive Tribal Groups), their distribution, special programmes for their development. Role of N.G.O.s in tribal development.

Official Syllabus: Paper II, Unit 9.1

This article covers the history of tribal administration, tribal policies, and plans and programmes with their implementation. Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups and the role of NGOs are in 9.1b. The Fifth and Sixth Schedules are explained in 7.1, Nehru’s Panchsheel and the working of ITDPs in 7.2, and the colonial timeline of tribal change in 7.3b; they are summarised here where the story needs them.

1. History of Administration of Tribal Areas

Example first: Wilkinson’s Rule in Kolhan. After the Kol rising of 1831–32 in Chotanagpur, Captain Thomas Wilkinson, the Agent of the new South-West Frontier Agency, chose not to rule the Ho country of Kolhan through police and courts. From 1837 he governed through the Ho’s own headmen: the village munda and the manki (head of a group of villages, a pir), with simple rules for land, revenue and disputes. These Wilkinson’s Rules kept outsiders and lawyers away and recognised customary authority. The case shows the colonial pattern in miniature: revolt first, then special administration, using tribal institutions as the lowest rung of the state.

1.1 Phases of colonial administration

The colonial record falls into three phases. The table sets them out with their main instruments.

• Non-regulation meant that the general regulations (laws) of a province did not run automatically; the Government of India Act of 1870 let the Governor-General make simple regulations for such tracts, and the Scheduled Districts Act of 1874 let the government decide which laws applied in listed “scheduled districts”.
• Criminalisation: the Criminal Tribes Act (1871, consolidated 1924) branded whole wandering and forest communities as “criminal by birth”, registered them and confined many to settlements that supplied cheap labour. It was repealed in 1952, but States’ Habitual Offenders Acts, police records and prison rules kept the label alive; the Supreme Court struck down such prison rules in 2024. The commissions on these “denotified” tribes are in 7.1.
• Why special rule came: each major revolt (Kol, Santhal, Birsa Munda’s ulgulan of 1899–1900) exposed land loss and outsider exploitation; special administration and tenancy laws were the state’s answer (movements in 7.4).

1.2 Excluded and Partially Excluded Areas (1935)

The Government of India Act, 1935 created two categories, listed in the Government of India (Excluded and Partially Excluded Areas) Order, 1936.

• Two readings: officials such as J.H. Hutton (Census Commissioner, 1931) and W.V. Grigson (The Aboriginal Problem in the Central Provinces and Berar, 1944) defended exclusion as protection; nationalists called it divide and rule that kept tribes apart from the freedom movement. G.S. Ghurye (The Aborigines “So-called” and Their Future, 1943) argued that tribes were “backward Hindus” who should be integrated.
• Verrier Elwin’s early idea of a protected “national park” for the most isolated groups (The Baiga, 1939) became the symbol of isolationism in this debate, though he later moved to protected integration (§2.2).

1.3 From the Constituent Assembly to the Schedules

• Two sub-committees of the Constituent Assembly studied tribal areas: the North-East Frontier (Assam) Tribal and Excluded Areas sub-committee under Gopinath Bordoloi, and the Excluded and Partially Excluded Areas (other than Assam) sub-committee under A.V. Thakkar (“Thakkar Bapa”).
• Their reports produced the Fifth Schedule (Scheduled Areas in central and western India: Governor’s power to make regulations on land transfer and moneylending, Tribes Advisory Councils, annual report to the President) and the Sixth Schedule (elected autonomous district councils in Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram). B.R. Ambedkar observed that “Scheduled Areas” were the old excluded and partially excluded areas under a new name. Both Schedules are compared in 7.1.
• What changed: the goal shifted from control to protection plus development, and tribes gained reserved seats and voice. What stayed: the area-based special regime, the Governor’s special powers and the forest bureaucracy.

1.4 The administrative machinery after 1950

• Centre: tribal welfare sat with the Home Ministry and then with social welfare departments until the Ministry of Tribal Affairs was carved out in October 1999 as the nodal ministry. A Commissioner for SCs and STs (Article 338) reported from 1950; a non-statutory Commission for SCs and STs came in 1978, a constitutional National Commission after the 65th Amendment (1990), and a separate National Commission for Scheduled Tribes (Article 338A, 89th Amendment, 2003) from 2004. The President also appoints a Scheduled Areas and Scheduled Tribes Commission under Article 339 (Dhebar, 1960–61; Bhuria, 2002–04).
• State: the Governor (Fifth Schedule powers and annual report), the Tribes Advisory Council (up to 20 members, three-fourths of them ST legislators), a Tribal Welfare Department, and a Tribal Research Institute for data, training and evaluation.
• District and project: the Collector, and the Project Officer of an Integrated Tribal Development Agency (ITDA), meant to coordinate all departments in a tribal project area.
• Village: the gram sabha with special powers under PESA (1996) and the Forest Rights Act (2006); in the North-East, the autonomous district councils and customary councils.

The weak link: reviews from the Dhebar Commission onward found that Governors rarely used their Fifth Schedule powers, Tribes Advisory Councils met irregularly and only on matters referred to them, and ITDA officers had little control over line departments. The machinery was elaborate on paper and weak at the joints.

2. Tribal Policies

2.1 Isolation, assimilation and integration

The three classic positions are compared below; the scholars’ debate is in 4b and the social effects in 7.2.

India’s official choice was integration: development without loss of identity. The table shows why: isolation had kept tribes poor and exploited under British rule, and assimilation would have destroyed what the Constitution set out to protect.

2.2 Nehru’s Panchsheel and Elwin’s contribution

Nehru’s Tribal Panchsheel, in his foreword to Elwin’s A Philosophy for NEFA (second edition, 1959), set five principles: develop “along the lines of their own genius”; respect land and forest rights; train their own people for administration; do not over-administer or overwhelm them with schemes; judge results by the quality of human character, not money spent. Their record is assessed in 7.2.

Verrier Elwin, the British-born anthropologist who became an Indian citizen in 1954, shaped post-independence policy more than any other anthropologist:

• Adviser for Tribal Affairs, NEFA (present Arunachal Pradesh) from 1954: he argued for administration through tribal councils, recruitment of local people, protection of land, use of local languages and respect for tribal arts and religion.
• A Philosophy for NEFA (1957; second edition 1959) gave the NEFA approach: neither a “museum” nor rapid assimilation, but gradual, self-directed change. Nehru’s Panchsheel was its preface.
• The 1959 committee on the 43 Special Multipurpose Tribal Blocks, which he chaired, criticised schemes copied unchanged from plains blocks and pressed for simpler, tribe-specific programmes; its report (1960) led to the Tribal Development Blocks.
• Assessment: critics called him an isolationist and later scholars noted his paternalism; but his principles of consent, land protection and tribal agency run through PESA and the Forest Rights Act.

2.3 The constitutional framework in brief

The Constitution turned policy into law. The table lists the main provisions and Acts that a policy answer cites.

• Changing the ST list: only Parliament can amend a Presidential order (Article 342(2)). Since 1999 a claim must be backed by the State government, the Registrar General of India and the National Commission before the Cabinet and Parliament act. A large revision came with the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Orders (Amendment) Act, 2002; recent additions such as the Hattee (2023) show the political pressures (6.1, 7.3b).

The list falls into the three types of safeguard usually named: protective (land, atrocities, bonded labour), political (seats, councils, PESA) and developmental (grants, the sub-plan). The gap between them is the theme of §4.

2.4 Five approaches to tribal welfare

Older reviews describe five agencies or approaches through which tribal welfare has been pursued, each with a typical strength and weakness.

The anthropological approach asks planners to study tribal values first, identify integrating forces and points of least resistance, train administrators in tribal culture, and watch the effects of schemes so that what destroys solidarity can be stopped. Cultural factors decide whether a programme is accepted: a scheme that clashes with land tenure, kinship or religious calendars fails however well funded.

2.5 The draft National Tribal Policy (2006)

The Ministry of Tribal Affairs prepared a draft National Tribal Policy in 2006, the first attempt at a single written policy. It was never finalised; the government later said it had been overtaken by new laws, and a High Level Committee (Xaxa, §3.4) was asked instead to prepare a position paper.

• Content: mother-tongue teaching at the primary level and residential schools; validation of tribal medicine; displacement only as a last resort, with land for land; converting forest villages into revenue villages; pattas and access to land records; intellectual property protection for traditional knowledge; strengthening Tribes Advisory Councils and autonomous councils; posting sensitive officers for fixed tenures; and stopping the stigma of the word “primitive“.
• Critique: it was a list of aims without legal force or funds; its section on “assimilation” through ending isolation sat uneasily with its promise to preserve identity; and it stayed silent on mining and consent, the main source of conflict. Its value lies in recording the problems in one place.

2.6 Shifting terrains: colonial to post-colonial policy

Policy has moved through five phases. The colonial state controlled and isolated; the Constitution chose integration with welfare; the Fifth Plan added area development through the sub-plan; the 1990s and 2000s turned to rights (PESA, the Forest Rights Act, land acquisition reform); and since 2023 the state has run saturation missions that try to deliver every scheme to every tribal household. Each phase corrected a gap in the last, yet the deepest gap, control over land and forest, has narrowed only slowly.

3. Plans and Programmes of Tribal Development

Example first: the 3 per cent that was not spent. In the 1960s the Andhra Pradesh government ordered every department to earmark 3% of its plan budget for Scheduled Tribes. The Shilu Ao study team (1969) found the order “largely ignored”: departments treated the small special tribal budget as the only money for tribes and spent their own funds elsewhere. This lesson, that tribal shares vanish unless they are separate and non-divertible, is why the Tribal Sub-Plan of 1974–75 made earmarking compulsory and placed the money under separate budget heads.

3.1 Plan by plan

The table follows the main steps from the First Plan to the present. Each step answers a failure of the one before.

3.2 The Tribal Sub-Plan

• Origins: a Planning Commission Task Force on Development of Tribal Areas under L.P. Vidyarthi (1972) found that tribal development had been treated as “welfare” rather than “development” and starved of funds; an Expert Committee under S.C. Dube (1972) drafted the new strategy; the administrator B.D. Sharma, a former Collector of Bastar, conceptualised the sub-plan inside government.
• Idea: a sub-plan within every State and Central plan, with funds at least in proportion to the ST population, shown under separate budget heads so they cannot be diverted.
• Objectives: narrow the gap between tribal and other areas; raise incomes (agriculture, horticulture, animal husbandry, forest produce); and eliminate exploitation: land alienation, moneylending, bonded labour, unfair forest and excise practices.
• Delivery units: ITDPs/ITDAs for contiguous areas where STs are a majority (about 190); MADA pockets (population 10,000 or more, at least 50% STs); clusters (5,000 or more, 50% STs); micro-projects for primitive groups (9.1b); and help for dispersed tribes.
• Funding: the State plan share; Central ministries’ sectoral outlays; Special Central Assistance (gap-filling, now the Pradhan Mantri Adi Adarsh Gram Yojana, 2021–26, aimed at 36,428 villages with at least half their people tribal); Article 275(1) grants; and institutional finance.
• Administration: a Project Officer coordinates; the Collector chairs a project-level committee with local MPs and MLAs; States were asked to pool funds under the Tribal Welfare Department. ITDPs worked beside rural schemes such as the Integrated Rural Development Programme (1978–80), but the two were rarely joined at the level of the family.

Critical appraisal. Reviews since the 1980s agree on four defects. First, funds were often notional: big dams, power plants and industries located in tribal areas were counted as sub-plan spending although non-tribals gained most (such investments made up about half or more of sub-plan outlays in some reviews). Second, the ITDP officer had little control over line departments, so the “single line administration” the planners wanted never came. Third, the sub-plan became a bundle of sectoral schemes rather than an area plan made with people. Fourth, protection (land, debt, bonded labour) lagged far behind construction. The sub-plan did, however, make tribal shares visible and auditable for the first time.

3.3 DAPST today

• Renaming: when plan and non-plan spending were merged in 2017–18, the sub-plan continued as the Development Action Plan for Scheduled Tribes (DAPST), also called the Scheduled Tribe Component. NITI Aayog‘s 2017 guidelines require obligated ministries to earmark a share of scheme funds (not less than half the ST population proportion, or as decided by a task force) and to book it under minor head 796, so that it cannot be diverted.
• Scale: besides the Ministry of Tribal Affairs, 41 ministries and departments earmark funds. Allocation rose from ₹23,206 crore (2016–17) to ₹1,39,190 crore (BE 2026–27) across about 210 schemes; the Ministry reports utilisation above 92% of revised estimates over five years and tracks it online through PFMS.
• State laws: undivided Andhra Pradesh gave the sub-plans statutory force in 2013; its successor law was extended in 2023 for ten years. The Centre has said it is not considering a central law.
• Critique: much of DAPST is a notional share of general schemes (roads, housing, health) rather than programmes designed with tribes; budget analyses by civil-society groups find the share of ST-specific schemes small. Allocation is easier to measure than benefit.

3.4 Committees and commissions

Every major turn in tribal policy followed a committee report. The chronology gives each one’s central finding.

• Dhebar set the agenda for decades: integrated development, protection before development, tribal councils alongside panchayats, and special care for the most backward layer (the origin of the PTG category).
• Xaxa (submitted 29 May 2014) found tribes worst off on almost every indicator and called for strict enforcement of PESA and the Forest Rights Act, gram sabha consent (not mere consultation) for land acquisition, mother-tongue schooling, a tribal health plan and better use of sub-plan funds. Most of its recommendations remained “under consideration”.

3.5 Programmes now

The present system works through umbrella schemes and saturation missions:

• Education: Eklavya Model Residential Schools (one in every block with more than 50% STs and at least 20,000 tribal people; 723 sanctioned and 499 functional with about 1.57 lakh students in March 2026), ashram schools, hostels and pre- and post-matric scholarships.
• Livelihood and forest produce: TRIFED, minimum support prices for minor forest produce and Van Dhan centres (6.2); the VB-G RAM G Act, 2025, in force from 1 July 2026, replaced MGNREGA and guarantees 125 days of work to rural households.
• Health: the National Sickle Cell Anaemia Elimination Mission (2023) and mobile medical units (6.2).
• Scheduled Castes: the parallel instruments are the Special Component Plan (1979, later the Scheduled Castes Sub-Plan and now DAPSC), post-matric scholarships (from 1944) and the Atrocities Act; their record mirrors the tribal one (7.1).
• Missions: PM-JANMAN for the 75 PVTGs (9.1b); the Dharti Aaba Janjatiya Gram Utkarsh Abhiyan for tribal-majority villages; the Adi Karmayogi Abhiyan for responsive local governance.

The table gives the latest verified status of the main schemes.

Why DAJGUA is linked to the Sustainable Development Goals: its interventions (houses, tap water, electricity, health units, schools and hostels, mobile connectivity, livelihoods) map onto SDG 1 (poverty), 2 (hunger), 3 (health), 4 (education), 6 (water), 7 (energy) and 9 (infrastructure); by targeting tribal-majority villages it serves the SDGs’ promise to leave no one behind.

4. Implementation: Achievements, Failures and the Way Forward

4.1 What has been achieved

• Education and representation: ST literacy rose from about 8.5% (1961) to 59% (2011); reserved seats and jobs created a tribal middle class and political leadership; PESA opened elected posts in Scheduled Areas.
• Infrastructure: roads, schools, hostels, health centres and electricity reached remote areas, especially after the saturation missions.
• Rights: the Forest Rights Act recognised individual and community rights over forests for the first time; gram sabhas used them at Niyamgiri (2013) and Mendha-Lekha (Gadchiroli).
• Visibility: earmarked budgets and online monitoring make tribal spending traceable.

4.2 Why implementation fell short

The table shows that most failures are institutional, not financial: funds rose many times, but the mechanisms that protect land and give tribes control remained weak.

Effect of reservation on unemployment. Job reservation (7.5% in central services) gave secure employment to a section of educated STs and created role models, but it cannot absorb the mass of tribal workers: quotas apply only to shrinking public-sector jobs, posts often remain unfilled for want of qualified candidates, and benefits concentrate among the better-off tribes. Most tribal workers remain cultivators, agricultural labourers and seasonal migrants (6.2).

4.3 Participation, sustainability and the way forward

• Planning from below: the Participatory Rural Appraisal method, associated with the British development scholar Robert Chambers (1990s), uses villagers’ own maps, seasonal calendars and wealth rankings so that plans begin with local knowledge. The Adi Karmayogi village vision plans and gram sabha micro-plans under PESA apply the same idea.
• Sustainable development: tribal development lasts only if it protects the resource base: community forest rights, watershed and minor-forest-produce value chains, and limits on extraction and displacement.
• Single-line administration and smaller units: one accountable officer for each tribal area, smaller districts, separate programmes for STs rather than joint SC–ST schemes, and officers posted for adequate tenures after training in tribal culture.
• Use the Schedules: Governors’ regulations on land and moneylending, regular Tribes Advisory Council meetings, and the Xaxa recommendations on consent and mother-tongue education.
• Anthropology’s role: studying tribal values, identifying resistance points and evaluating effects, as Elwin and the Tribal Research Institutes did (the full discussion is in 9.2).

Key Terms

Contemporary Developments

• DAPST 2026–27: ₹1,39,190 crore earmarked across 41 ministries; the Centre told Parliament in April 2026 that it does not plan a central law on sub-plan funds.
• Dharti Aaba mission: by July 2026, 13.03 lakh houses sanctioned and 8.22 lakh completed in tribal-majority villages; reviews flagged delays in roads, hostels and mobile towers.
• PM-JANMAN: 4.83 lakh PVTG houses sanctioned and 3.06 lakh completed by 30 June 2026; a habitation survey counted about 48.5 lakh PVTG people.
• VB-G RAM G Act: in force from 1 July 2026, replacing MGNREGA with a 125-day guarantee.
• EMRS: 499 schools functional of 723 sanctioned (March 2026), enrolling about 1.57 lakh students.

Diagrams to Master

• Topic map: colonial history, Constitution, policies, plans, committees, programmes and implementation.
• Administrative machinery: Centre (Ministry of Tribal Affairs 1999, NCST 2004, NITI Aayog), State (Governor, Tribes Advisory Council, Tribal Welfare Department, Tribal Research Institute), district (Collector, ITDA), village (gram sabha or district council).
• Policy phases: isolation, integration, sub-plan, rights, saturation; one instrument and one gap each.
• Sub-plan to DAPST: five funding sources, delivery units, minor head 796, 2016–17 and 2026–27 figures, weaknesses.
• Committees chronology: Elwin, Dhebar, Lokur, Shilu Ao, Vidyarthi and Dube, Bhuria (twice), Xaxa.

Revision Grid

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