Tribal Situation in India

Abstract

Tribal Research Institute, Gujarat celebrated its Golden Jubilee in 2013. Various programmes were carried out as part of the two-year-long celebration. One of the programmes was to organize a regional seminar on 'Issues and Development of Tribal Communities in Western India. Academicians and tribal activists from four states Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra participated in the seminar and presented their research papers. They were asked to revise their papers based on the discussion held during seminar. Present volume is the collection of these revised papers. It includes two papers on general issues, four papers on tribal situations in four respective states, two papers on land and forest issues, two papers on health issues, three papers on education, two papers on development and identity issues and two papers on tribal administration issues. We had to drop some papers as they did not fulfil the requirement.

The senior editor, Vidyut Joshi, had brought out a book Tribal Situation in India around 1998. At that time the impact of liberalization, privatization and globalization were not so clear as they are today. Moreover, tribals world over have been organizing under the banner of UNO to assert their first nation identity. They have a different concept of development, which is going to become important in future. This change has given a paradigm shift to tribal studies world over. This volume incorporates two such papers along with development studies.

Tribals living in western India belt share a common environment. They were not fully isolated, some of them had direct interactions on daily basis with non-tribals living in these four states. Gandhian workers went to this belt and started Ashrams around 1922 which became centres of tribal development activities. One finds more education, more forest co-operatives, better agriculture and almost no violent organizations which can be seen in other tribal areas of the country. In some cases a tribe is found in one pocket spread in three different states. They have marriage relations, common history, common dialect and also a feeling of belongingness to one community. Bhils of Jhabua (MP) and of Panchmahals (Gujarat) and Tadavis of Maharashtra and Gujarat represent such cases. It was because of this that when Tadavis of Maharashtra faced submergence at Saradar Sarovar project, they preferred to rehabilitate in Gujarat with their Tadavi kins.

Since most of the papers presented in this seminar have state bias, commonalities were not consciously brought out in papers. Our objective was to share our experiences and learn from each other. We found that not only the tribals have common life and culture, they also face common problems. Depletion of resources, growing poverty, submergence and rehabilitation and seasonal migration. These commonalities require a common approach in all the four states. The tribal administration is state specific, but there are common and inter-dependent problems.

A reader will find three different undercurrents in this volume: (1) ethnographic studies, (2) development studies, and (3) identity or critical studies. The last trend has appeared strongly after 1980. We have incorporated papers having all the three approaches.