Given the diversities among tribal communities in India, in which specific contexts should they be considered as a single category?

India's roughly 700 Scheduled Tribes — from the Gonds, Bhils and Santhals to 75 Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups — differ vastly in language, ecology, faith and social organisation. Yet in specific contexts they must be treated as a single category.

Contexts warranting a single category

• Constitutional-legal: notification under Article 342, reservation in legislatures, public employment and education, and the Fifth and Sixth Schedules create one juridical class of Scheduled Tribes.
• Common protective legislation: PESA, 1996, the Forest Rights Act, 2006 and the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 address tribals as a whole because the injustices they remedy are shared.
• Shared structural deprivation: tribal populations consistently lag the national average on poverty, literacy, malnutrition and maternal health, justifying umbrella programmes such as Eklavya Model Residential Schools, PM-JANMAN and the Dharti Aaba Janjatiya Gram Utkarsh Abhiyan.
• Land and displacement: land alienation and development-induced displacement hit tribals disproportionately — an estimated two-fifths of all people displaced by large projects since Independence.
• Cultural vulnerability: erosion of tribal languages, customary institutions and community resource rights under assimilation pressure is an experience common to tribes and distinct from caste society.

The single category is thus an administrative and protective construct, not a cultural description. Sound policy combines the umbrella with community-specific approaches — as attempted for PVTGs — so that homogenising welfare does not flatten the very diversity it seeks to protect.