Devesh Kapur and Arvind Subramanian

Under British rule, tribal rights to forests were progressively encroached upon by the State and its petty functionaries, leading to their exploitation by landlords, moneylenders and contractors. Moneylending trapped tribals into debt-service obligations passed across generations, resulting in large scale land alienation. The result was numerous rebellions in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Tribal literacy rates prior to Independence were 0.7 per cent and the British policy of isolation meant that tribal areas were deliberately starved of communication facilities, other than the few roads to enable contractors to extract forest resources. Conversions by missionaries provided education in the English language, which then privileged Christian tribals over non-Christian ones, since knowledge of English was a distinct advantage in getting better jobs.

The new Indian state broadly accepted the principle that it had a responsibility for the welfare of the community as well as the development of the tribal areas. Given the history of past exploitation, statutory safeguards were provided to protect tribal lands, which served as the mainstay of their economic and cultural lives. Yet the scheduled areas, which covered about 100,000 square miles and had a tribal population of 8.6 million in 1951, left out more than half of the tribals who lived outside these areas.

The challenge of integration and development was in part due to the tribals’ physical isolation and distinct cultural practices and led to two approaches: protective and developmental. The former related to the protection of tribal lands and safeguards from non-tribals, especially moneylenders. Notionally, the State saw its role as trying to ‘help the tribal people to develop along the lines of their own tradition and genius’. But how? And what if this clashed with other State goals?

Extremely high levels of illiteracy particularly handicapped the tribal population of central India. While overall ST literacy rates were a paltry 8.5 per cent in 1961 (one-third of the national rate), those in the central Indian belt were minuscule: 4 per cent in Rajasthan, 4.4 per cent in Andhra Pradesh, 5.1 per cent in Madhya Pradesh, 5.9 per cent in Madras and 7.4 per cent in Orissa. The central government did begin setting up residential tribal schools from the 1950s and with greater intensity in the 1990s (Ashram Schools, Eklavya Model Residential Schools and the Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalaya scheme), but their impact was vitiated by social prejudice in the classrooms due to limited locally recruited teachers and few classes in tribal languages. An official report in 2014 questioned whether ‘the State is actually pursuing assimilation rather than integration’.