The tribal commons is a treaty the modern state still owes

Verrier Elwin spent a lifetime arguing a single point: tribal India is not pre-modern India. It is parallel India — a civilisation with different relationships to land, to time, to the self. Elwin came to Mandla in 1932 as a Christian missionary; he stayed, marrying Gond and Pardhan partners, until his death in 1964 in Shillong. Modern India has 705 Scheduled Tribes, 75 Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups, and 8.6 per cent of its population identified as tribal in Census 2011. The relationship between the modern Indian state and the tribal commons — the forests, sacred groves, customary lands and shared resources of these communities — is a treaty long promised, partially signed, and often breached. To honour it is constitutional duty, not generosity.

The legal architecture is layered and ambitious. The Fifth Schedule of the Constitution provides for the administration of Scheduled Areas in nine states; the Sixth Schedule provides autonomous district councils in Assam, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Tripura. The Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act 1996 (PESA), in its critical Section 4(d), requires gram sabha consent for land alienation and development decisions in Fifth Schedule areas — a constitutional vesting of veto in the village assembly. The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act 2006, popularly called the Forest Rights Act, recognised individual and community forest rights that had been systematically denied since colonial-era forest reservation. The Supreme Court's 2013 judgment in Orissa Mining Corporation v Ministry of Environment & Forests — the Niyamgiri case — gave the Dongria Kondh of Odisha's hills the right, through their gram sabhas, to vote on whether bauxite mining could proceed. All twelve gram sabhas voted no. The mine was stopped. The judgment was not merely a verdict in a single case; it was a constitutional doctrine that gram sabhas hold substantive consent powers, not merely consultative roles.

The breaches are equally documented. The Compensatory Afforestation Fund Management and Planning Authority handles tens of thousands of crores from forest diversion payments without statutory requirement of gram-sabha consent. The Ministry of Tribal Affairs' data for 2024 records that 32 per cent of Individual Forest Rights claims under the FRA have been rejected, with rejection rates exceeding 50 per cent in states like Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. The Forest (Conservation) Amendment Act 2023, despite legal challenges, narrowed the scope of forest land protection. The Hasdeo Aranya struggle in Chhattisgarh between 2023 and 2025 saw tribal communities resist coal-block clearances in dense forest tracts that they had inhabited for generations. The Sociologist Walter Fernandes has estimated that 25 million tribals have been displaced since 1947 by dams, mines, industrial projects and conservation enclosures — a population larger than several European countries, scattered into urban poverty and shrinking rural commons. Each displacement is a small private rupture for a family that had a place in the world; cumulatively, they are a structural failure of the constitutional promise.

The pathways forward are visible but require sustained will. The PM-JANMAN scheme, launched on 15 November 2023 with an outlay of 24,104 crore rupees, targets nine critical interventions for Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups — housing, road connectivity, piped water, mobile medical units, hostels for tribal students. The Adi Karmyogi Programme, launched in 2025, builds a three-tier cadre of tribal change leaders trained in Constitution, schemes, and community mobilisation. Janjatiya Gaurav Divas, institutionalised in 2021 on 15 November to commemorate Birsa Munda's birth anniversary, has shifted national memory toward tribal contributions to the freedom struggle. Integrated Tribal Development Agencies in many states are being strengthened. The Eklavya Model Residential Schools, expanded under the Modi government's 2018-onward programme, target high-quality education for tribal children in their own regions. Bio-cultural community protocols — formal documents in which tribal communities articulate their own governance norms — are being used in REDD-plus projects. The Khasi Hills REDD-plus project in Meghalaya, which earned its first verified emission reductions in 2023, demonstrates how traditional community management can interlock with global carbon markets without surrendering local sovereignty.

A serious counter-view deserves engagement. Some argue absolute tribal autonomy isolates communities from modern healthcare, education, markets and infrastructure that they themselves need. The PVTGs identified for PM-JANMAN have some of the worst maternal mortality, child malnutrition and adult literacy outcomes in the country. Cellular reception, school buildings, primary health centres, all-weather roads — these are not impositions; they are entitlements. The binary of 'pristine autonomy' versus 'forced integration' is false and dangerous. The Khasi Hills REDD-plus example, the Kerala tribal-administration model under Athulyam, the Attappady Comprehensive Tribal Development Project, and the Niyamgiri precedent all demonstrate that community choice — exercised by the people themselves through their gram sabhas — can be both traditional and globally connected. The discipline is to ensure choice is real, not coerced.

The deeper issue is the political economy of the commons. The Indian state's developmental promise to tribal areas has often been conditional on the extraction of the resources those areas hold: bauxite in Niyamgiri, iron in Bastar, coal in Hasdeo, uranium in Jadugoda, copper in Malanjkhand, manganese in Balaghat. The economic logic of national growth has repeatedly collided with the constitutional logic of local consent. PESA's Section 4(d), if honestly implemented, would re-balance this collision. The FRA's community forest rights, when actually granted, would transfer governance to those who have historically borne the cost. The pending question is whether the state, faced with the rising commodity demands of the energy transition (especially critical minerals located in tribal regions), will follow its own statutes or circumvent them. The 2025 Critical Minerals Mission's emphasis on tribal-region exploration makes this question sharper than at any point since liberalisation.

Education, language and health are quieter dimensions of the same struggle. Hundreds of tribal languages lack standardised scripts and school textbooks; the 2009 Right to Education Act's mother-tongue principle is observed unevenly. The 2024 National Sickle Cell Anaemia Elimination Mission, targeting elimination by 2047 with 4.5 crore people to be screened, addresses one acute tribal-health priority among many identified by Dr Abhay Bang's Expert Committee on Tribal Health (2018). The pattern across health, education and economic indicators is consistent: when interventions are designed with tribal participation, outcomes improve; when designed for tribal communities without their participation, they fail or are resisted.

Birsa Munda's Ulgulan — the 'great tumult' of 1899-1900 against landlords, missionaries and colonial dispossession — was not separatism. It was the demand for an honest contract: that those who had lived on a land for generations be recognised as belonging to it. The contract Birsa demanded was constitutional in spirit before there was a Constitution. The republic that emerged in 1950 wrote that recognition into the Fifth Schedule, the Sixth Schedule, PESA, the FRA, and a steady jurisprudence. The constitutional treaty with tribal India must be re-read in 2026 with the seriousness it always deserved. Honoured, it strengthens both tribal communities and the republic that contains them. Breached, it leaves both poorer than the document promised.