A Historical Review of Tribal Development Policies in India

Long before India became a republic, its tribal communities were already living under policies designed by people who rarely lived among them. From colonial “exclusion” orders to the modern PM-JANMAN mission, tribal development policy in India has swung between protecting cultural identity and pushing economic integration. Understanding this journey helps explain why some schemes worked, why others failed, and why the demand for one comprehensive national policy still hasn’t been fully answered.

The colonial roots of tribal policy 🔗

British administrators treated tribal regions as a problem to be managed rather than a society to be developed. The idea that tribal areas needed separate legal treatment goes back to the Scheduled Districts Act of 1874, which kept many regions outside the ordinary laws applied to the rest of British India. The stated reason was protection from exploitation, but the real effect was administrative convenience and continued isolation.

Excluded and partially excluded areas 🔗

This approach hardened under the Government of India Act of 1935, which formally created Excluded Areas and Partially Excluded Areas. Ordinary provincial laws and elected legislatures had little or no power here. Governors, acting on their own discretion, controlled these regions. It was practical for colonial rule, but it left tribal communities with almost no political voice at the very moment modern administration was expanding around them.

Independence, the Constitution, and Nehru’s approach 🔗

At independence, these excluded and partially excluded areas were carried forward into the Constitution as Scheduled Areas, protected under the Fifth and Sixth Schedules. But policymakers still disagreed sharply on the right philosophy for tribal welfare.

The Elwin-Ghurye debate 🔗

Anthropologist Verrier Elwin argued that tribal communities should be shielded from outside contact to protect their culture and prevent exploitation, even proposing “national parks” where tribal life could continue undisturbed. Sociologist G. S. Ghurye took the opposite view, insisting that isolation itself caused backwardness and that assimilation into wider Indian society was the better path. As one academic lecture on the subject puts it, both scholars eventually stepped back from their original extreme positions and moved toward a middle ground of integration.

Jawaharlal Nehru resolved this debate in practice through his famous Tribal Panchsheel, a five-point philosophy urging that tribal people develop along the lines of their own genius, that their land and forest rights be respected, and that tribal people themselves be trained to administer their own areas rather than depending entirely on outside officials. This became the guiding spirit of tribal policy for decades, even as its application varied widely from state to state.

Key commissions and committees that shaped policy 🔗

Much of what we now think of as tribal policy did not come from a single law. It came from a series of commissions set up to investigate specific failures.

The Dhebar Commission (1960-61) 🔗

The Scheduled Areas and Scheduled Tribes Commission, chaired by U. N. Dhebar, remains one of the most influential tribal policy reviews in Indian history. It documented widespread land alienation, indebtedness, and exploitation of tribal communities, and recommended stronger legal safeguards against the transfer of tribal land to non-tribal owners. Crucially, the Commission also noticed that development was uneven even within Scheduled Tribes themselves. This single observation eventually led to the creation of a separate category, now called Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTGs), for communities with pre-agricultural economies, very low literacy, and stagnant or declining populations.

Elwin Committee, Shilu Ao Committee, and others 🔗

Alongside Dhebar, several smaller committees examined specific gaps. The Elwin Committee (1959) reviewed the functioning of Multi-Purpose Development Blocks, the basic administrative unit for tribal programmes at the time. The Shilu Ao Committee (1966) continued this focus on welfare delivery, while the Lokur Committee (1965) set the criteria still used to identify Scheduled Tribes: primitive traits, distinct culture, geographical isolation, shyness of contact with the wider community, and general backwardness. Later, the Bhuria Committee (1991) laid the groundwork for extending local self-governance into Scheduled Areas.

Tribal Sub-Plan and special development programmes 🔗

By the early 1970s, it was clear that general development schemes simply weren’t reaching tribal regions. An Expert Committee set up in 1972 recommended a dedicated strategy, and the result was the Tribal Sub-Plan (TSP), introduced in 1974-75 during the Fifth Five-Year Plan as a way to guarantee that a proportionate share of development funds actually reached Scheduled Tribes.

How the Tribal Sub-Plan worked 🔗

The idea was straightforward on paper: states and central ministries had to earmark funds in line with the tribal share of the population, and these funds could not be diverted to other schemes. Implementation happened through Integrated Tribal Development Agencies (ITDAs), which combined financial, organisational, and programme resources at the district level. Coverage expanded steadily – by the end of the Ninth Five-Year Plan in 2002, 23 states and union territories had adopted the TSP framework. Over time, the Tribal Sub-Plan was renamed the Development Action Plan for Scheduled Tribes (DAPST), and today 41 ministries and departments contribute a share of their budgets toward tribal development projects covering education, health, roads, irrigation, and skill development.

PESA and the Forest Rights Act 🔗

Two later laws deepened this framework considerably. The Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996 (PESA), gave Gram Sabhas in Scheduled Areas real authority over local resources and development priorities, rather than a merely advisory role. A decade later, the Forest Rights Act, 2006, recognised individual and community rights of forest-dwelling tribal communities over land they had traditionally occupied. Both laws were meant to correct decades of one-way, top-down planning, though implementation on the ground has been far from smooth.

Persistent challenges and the case for a comprehensive national policy 🔗

Despite this long list of commissions, committees, and legislation, gaps remain wide. A government-commissioned review acknowledged that a majority of Scheduled Tribes continue to live below the poverty line, have low literacy rates, and remain vulnerable to displacement, even while being recognised as holders of valuable indigenous knowledge. This recognition led to a Draft National Policy on Tribals in 2006, intended to bring together the scattered legal and welfare framework into a single, coherent document.

Why a single policy still hasn’t taken shape 🔗

The 2006 draft ran into criticism almost immediately. Commentary in the Economic and Political Weekly pointed out that the draft actually proposed reviving a “single line administration” model that would concentrate power in district officials rather than genuinely decentralising decision-making to tribal communities themselves. Displacement due to mining and infrastructure projects, incomplete implementation of PESA, weak consultation with Gram Sabhas before land acquisition, and continuing gaps in health and education access have all been flagged repeatedly in subsequent reviews. The core problem is not a lack of schemes – India now has dozens – but weak coordination, patchy data, and inconsistent enforcement of existing rights.

Future directions for tribal welfare 🔗

Recent efforts try to fix this coordination problem directly rather than adding another scheme to an already crowded list. The Pradhan Mantri Janjati Adivasi Nyaya Maha Abhiyan (PM-JANMAN), launched in November 2023, specifically targets the 75 recognised PVTG communities. It brings together eleven interventions implemented by nine different central ministries, covering housing, safe drinking water, healthcare, education, electrification, road connectivity, and sustainable livelihoods, with the explicit goal of fully saturating PVTG habitations with basic services within a defined timeframe.

This model – pooling multiple ministries under one mission with shared monitoring – reflects a broader lesson from seven decades of tribal policy. Fragmented schemes, however well-intentioned, tend to leave the most vulnerable groups behind precisely because no single agency is accountable for outcomes. A genuinely comprehensive national policy would need to combine three things that have rarely come together so far: legally enforceable land and forest rights, real decision-making power for Gram Sabhas as promised under PESA, and coordinated, well-monitored funding that actually reaches the last habitation rather than stopping at the district headquarters.

What do you think? Do you think a single, comprehensive national tribal policy could succeed where decades of separate commissions, sub-plans, and missions have struggled? And has the shift from “protection” to “participation” in laws like PESA actually changed how development decisions get made on the ground?

References

1. https://www.egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/69298/1/Unit-1.pdf
2. https://www.csds.in/elwin_ghurye_debate_in_retrospect_lecture_by_virginius_xaxa
3. https://www.egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/87933/1/Unit-23.pdf
4. https://cag.gov.in/en/audit-report/details/15997
5. https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/099060425063637099/pdf/P177653-1d3952eb-a413-4db8-b400-83b3c0a64fbf.pdf
6. https://tribal.nic.in/STCMonitoring.aspx
7. https://prsindia.org/files/bills_acts/bills_parliament/2005/bill53_2007010353_Draft_National_Policy_on_Tribals.pdf
8. https://www.epw.in/journal/2006/34/commentary/draft-national-tribal-policy-2006-creating-consternation.html
9. https://tribal.nic.in/PM-JANMAN.aspx