CHALLENGES OF TRIBAL DEVELOPMENT: Contemporary Social Concerns

The tribals in India who have been rich in terms of possessing natural resources in their respective regions, still continue to live in underdevelopment and are inaccessible to most of the development indicators. The present volume provides critical insights to understand the major challenges of tribal development in India. Why do we discuss the challenges of tribal development even after 74 years of India’s independence? Is tribal development a priority to the successive governments? If so, why scheduled tribe (ST) communities are still lagging much behind as compared to rest of the social groups, including scheduled castes, in social, political and economic indicators? Why is tribal development a major challenge? This volume offers a fairly comprehensive account of a wide range of insights with reference to such issues across the states. It is evident from the available data that most of the wealth from the tribal areas is being driven for the development of non-tribal areas in India. This itself constitutes one of the major challenges of tribal development in India. The authors find that areas such as education, health, displacement, forest, governance, livelihood promotion, poverty etc. constitute the biggest challenge to tribal development. What is needed to address the challenges of tribal development is a strong will of the state and a sound social determination among various civil society groups. The present volume, while discussing the issues pertaining to agriculture, decentralisation, displacement, education, forest rights, governance, health and livelihood with reference to scheduled tribes in India, also suggests some policy measures. It covers a range of research areas on tribal studies in the interdisciplinary perspective.