Looking ahead and building up the vulnerable communities: How India will address the PVTGs

With the G20 ending with the declaration of its countries’ commitment to include and improve the problems faced by the most vulnerable and underserved people, we need to shift our focus to one of the most vulnerable groups in India, the PVTGs.

Who are PVTGs and what do we know about them?

Following 30 years of India’s Independence, the Government of India identified 52 “Primitive Tribes'' in 1974-75 under the Scheduled Tribes (ST) community. What separated these tribes from the others were the observations of their pre-agricultural levels of technology, low levels of literacy, declining or stagnating population, and subsistence level of the economy. Fast-forward to 1993, the Government added 23 additional groups to the category which accumulated to 75 tribes under what we now call the Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTGs). Currently, they account for approximately 28 lakh individuals which is less than 0.01% of the total population of India.?

These groups are primarily forest-dwellers and are often marked with traits such as loss of traditional livelihoods, habitats, customary resource rights; distinct culture; geographical and political isolation; and a stark dearth of formal education and job opportunities, health and social infrastructures, and social security entitlements. Moreover, since their subsistence and livelihood come from the forests, their dependency on forest-based products is festered with problems due to climate change that often shifts and reduces yield and production besides limited access to forest rights.

What provisions and schemes exist for the PVTGs right now?

In order to battle their long-standing structural issues and improve their socio-economic development, the Central and State Governments have launched a myriad of schemes that aim to address the significant issues faced by the PVTGs.?

One such overarching scheme that has specific provisions for the ST communities is the ‘Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan’, launched in 2001-02 by the Government of India along with State and Local Governments. It aimed to tackle the literacy gap for children aged 6 to 14 and had made special provisions for opening schools in tribal areas, especially with high concentrations of SC/ST and minority populations. In India, Odisha has the largest population of PVTGs with 13 unique groups in the state. In 2017, the Government of Odisha launched the Odisha PVTG Empowerment and Livelihoods Improvement Programme (OPELIP) to enhance the living conditions of PVTGs and reduce their poverty. It sought to enable improved livelihoods and food and nutrition security primarily for 32,090 PVTG households, 14,000 other tribal households and 16,356 other poor and Scheduled Caste (SC) households. Odisha has also come out with a targeted initiative under OPELIP, called the Odisha PVTG Nutritional Improvement Programme (OPNIP), which has undertaken three major interventions: community-based creches for children ages between 6 months to 3 years, spot feeding centres for children aged between 3 to 6 years, and maternal spot feeding centres for pregnant and lactating mothers.

Aside from these, a pinpointed approach towards PVTG development occurred in 2002 when the Government of Jharkhand launched the ‘Jharkhand Tribal Development Society’ (JTDS) as an autonomous body to carry out livelihood interventions for PVTGs in 2.34 lakh households across 14 districts in Jharkhand. The program includes working for community empowerment, integrated natural resource management, livelihood support, and project management endeavours. To improve the reach of State programs to PVTGs, the Government of Jharkhand also came out with its ‘Dakiya Yojana’ which encourages the communities to avail themselves of the benefits under the targeted public distribution system (TPDS) through its ‘free rice distribution’ scheme that intends to deliver food grains to the doorsteps of PVTG families in Jharkhand, as they often live in remote areas where going to PDS for food grains is difficult and not feasible.?

Although government schemes and programs have been working for the socio-economic mobility of the PVTGs, the reality is that they haven’t been ideally undertaken and implemented. This could partly be due to the spatial homogeneity of these groups as they are often unevenly distributed in a given area and the remote locations of their habitations which make it difficult for the provisions from the government to reach them. Therefore, their living conditions, employment opportunities and state-mandated provisions remain unfulfilled from what the plans had originally aimed to achieve. However, the Government has recently called for a push from various ministries and governmental bodies to have a clear roadmap to address the collective and aspirational problems of PVTGs. To facilitate this, the Central Government announced the Pradhan Mantri PVTG Development Mission in February 2023, which is a three-year programme with an outlay of Rs 15,000 crores that will work towards basic infrastructure, financial inclusion and skill development, health and nutrition, education, agriculture and water resources, and overall social development for 2.8 million members of PVTGs across 22,544 villages in 18 States and 1 Union Territory (UT).? Besides, the Union government has also announced an Aspirational Blocks Programme that will focus on improving governance to enhance the quality of life of citizens in the most difficult and underdeveloped blocks in the country by converging existing schemes, defining outcomes and regular monitoring. The program covers 500 blocks across 27 States and 4 UTs focusing on sectors such as health and nutrition, education, agriculture, basic infrastructure and social development.?

The development of PVTGs also works in tandem with the recent G20 discourse as India marked its plans to financially and socially include the most vulnerable and underserved individuals. There was also a strong focus on the financial inclusion and empowerment of vulnerable individuals and communities through the G20 2023 Financial Inclusion Action Plan (FIAP) which aims to provide a roadmap for “rapidly accelerating the financial inclusion of individuals and MSMEs, particularly vulnerable and underserved groups in the G20 countries and beyond.”?

PDAG’s approach to working with the PVTGs

At PDAG, we have been conducting evidence-driven policy work on and around issues faced by PVTGs with policymakers & civil society organisations. As part of our approach, we are undertaking an in-depth research project in collaboration with the Dr. Ram Dayal Munda Tribal Research Institute, Ranchi that evaluates the Central and State schemes meant for the PVTGs, to figure out the bottlenecks that exist in their optimal implementation and recommend solutions to mitigate them. In addition, we are providing necessary technical and knowledge support to NITI Aayog for 60 Aspirational Blocks in the country with a considerable share of PVTG population to ascertain better and improved governance and socio-economic outcomes for them. Moreover, PDAG provides technical support to State Governments, UN bodies, and Civil Society organisations, ensuring effective governance and impactful interventions that resonate with the communities' unique needs and aspirations. As we continue to expand our work in core areas such as governance, climate sustainability, sports for social mobility, gender, migration, and social impact, we aim to strive for maximum intersectionality and persistently work for the inclusion of vulnerable groups in having effective schemes and governance. We are determined to work from the ground up as we move forward with our collaborative efforts alongside policy-makers, multilateral institutions, impact investors, and both academic and non-academic researchers through several partnerships.?

This is the fourth blog post in the #Where'sPublicinPublicPolicy series by PDAG.

References:

Raj, Rohan. “A study of the current status of PVTGs Dakia Yojana”, Jharkhand State Food Commission. (https://jharkhandsfc.in/pdf/intrn_rprt/report_rohan_raj.pdf )

Mohanty, Aishwarya. “Particularly vulnerable tribes: How a focus on nutrition tipped the health scale for children in remote Odisha”, Down To Earth, 13 April 2023. (https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/governance/particularly-vulnerable-tribes-how-a-focus-on-nutrition-tipped-the-health-scale-for-children-in-remote-odisha-88749 )?

“G20 New Delhi Leaders’ Declaration”, (https://www.g20.org/content/dam/gtwenty/gtwenty_new/document/G20-New-Delhi-Leaders-Declaration.pdf )

“2023 Financial Inclusion Action Plan July 2023”, Global Partnership for Financial Inclusion. (https://www.g20.org/content/dam/gtwenty/gtwenty_new/document/G20_GPFI_FIAP_2023.pdf )

#PVTG #TribalGroups #G20 #PolicyandResearch #VulnerableCommunities?#peoplecentredpublicpolicy #WhereisPublicinPublicPolicy