This encyclopaedia work in five volumes covers all related and relevant information about the scheduled tribes in India. The comprehensive, exclusive and exhaustive work will be an invaluable reference tool for scholars, researchers, planners, administrator, policy makers, govt. official and the others.

In We Were Adivasis, anthropologist Megan Moodie examines the Indian state’s relationship to “Scheduled Tribes,” or adivasis—historically oppressed groups that are now entitled to affirmative action quotas in educational and political institutions. Through a deep ethnography of the Dhanka in Jaipur, Moodie brings readers inside the creative imaginative work of these long-marginalized tribal communities. She shows how they must simultaneously affirm and refute their tribal status on a range of levels, from domestic interactions to historical representation, by relegating their status to the past: we were adivasis. Moodie takes readers to a diversity of settings, including households, tribal council meetings, and wedding festivals, to reveal the aspirations that are expressed in each. Crucially, she demonstrates how such aspiration and identity-building are strongly gendered, requiring different dispositions required of men and women in the pursuit of collective social uplift. The Dhanka strategy for occupying the role of adivasi in urban India comes at a cost: young women must relinquish dreams of education and employment in favor of community-sanctioned marriage and domestic life. Ultimately, We Were Adivasis explores how such groups negotiate their pasts to articulate different visions of a yet uncertain future in the increasingly liberalized world.

A people in need of quick modernization and mainstreaming, or a powerful defense against the advancing march of capitalist growth---these are the two most prominent and stereotypical images of Adivasis in contemporary India, and both do grave injustice to the ground realities. The category Scheduled Tribes, which is purely an administrative category, and does not reflect the immense diversity among the 500 different communities of tribals in India, comprising 8.6 per cent of Indias population, has acquired over a period of time, a distinct political and discursive salience. This collection of essays, divided in three parts, brings together a range of predominantly sociological and anthropological but broadly social science writing that reflects on and illuminates the jungle of dilemmas and conflicts that the scheduled tribes face as they navigate their way through everyday life. It highlights the enormity of social, cultural, linguistic, and politico-economic diversity among the so-called Scheduled Tribes in India, and aims to provide an intellectual platform for an engagement between the scheduled tribes and their India, as also to map the state of current sociological/anthropological writing and debate on the scheduled tribes.

This volume explores the complexities of governance, law, and politics in India’s Scheduled Areas. The Scheduled Areas (SAs) are those parts of the country which have been identified by the Fifth and Sixth Schedule of the Constitution of India and are inhabited predominantly by tribal communities or Scheduled Tribes. SAs are often identified by their geographical isolation, primitive economies, and relatively egalitarian and closely knit society. Irrespective of the constitutional provision for governance and a mandate of devolution of power in terms of funds, functions and functionaries, the backwardness of these areas have remained a challenge. This volume attempts to explore the reasons behind the disregard for legal and institutional mechanism designed for the SAs. It examines the role of the state in the neoliberal era on fund allocation and utilisation, the governance of land and forest resources, and the ineffectiveness of the existing administrative structures and processes. It also looks into the interpretations of law by the judiciary while dealing with community rights vis-à-vis the state’s prerogative of bringing development to the regions, and how development concerns are addressed in the name of ‘good governance’ by various stakeholders. Comprehensive and topical, this volume will be useful for scholars and researchers of political studies, development studies, developmental economics, sociology and social anthropology, and for policy makers.

This book revisits some of the persisting challenges of development of India, which remain unresolved even after twenty-five years of economic reforms and almost fifteen years of high growth rate. These include defining purpose of development, inequality, labour, work, unemployment, agrarian distress and migration. The book questions the overemphasis on growth to the extent of neglecting basic issues of development. With a number of contributions re-imagining development and its political economy, the book discusses above mentioned issues in light of new data and more recent conceptions of the issues. The contributors of this volume are eminent researchers in their respective field. Presenting primary as well as secondary data, the book considers the latest advances and research and also addresses new challenges like the global reorganization of production and the consequences for labour and the world of work, along with skills question. World of work has received detailed investigation in this book. This is a timely addition in existing literature especially in context of pandemic and lockdown. Informality and un/employment question is addressed in this context. Relationship among poverty, inequality and growth is examined in light of newer understanding. Agrarian distress is looked in a broader context. A number of papers are examining migration question by expanding coverage of migration and including labour mobility as apart of migration debate. The present crisis of migrant labour and absence of social security for these workers is also discussed. This book is primarily intended for those interested in recent advances on some of the basic aspects of development, like poverty, inequality, informality, word of work, migration and labour mobility. It is also useful for researchers, policy makers, journalists and civil society organizations working on these issues.