Govt To Develop Human Index For Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups

The Centre is now looking to design a survey that can gauge the human development index (HDI) specifically for about 28 lakh people belonging to the Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTGs) living in over 22,544 villages across the country.

Speaking on the first-ever such attempt, Union Tribal Affairs Minister Arjun Munda said, "We will collect information about the changes in their lives and document it, or simply put, make a database from it at the village-level. We basically want to draw up an HDI for primitive tribal groups. This will also be able to quantify how government policies are changing their lives."

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had in this year's budget speech announced a Rs 15,000-crore expenditure outlay for the Pradhan Mantri Primitive Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PM-PVTG) Development Mission, to be spent over the next three years. The program envisions connecting all the PVTG villages to basic government services like communications, electricity, public education, healthcare, water supply and connectivity.

The said HDI survey will be conducted as a part of this mission. "Such a policy with such an allocation has never been made before. With a holistic approach, we will document their lifestyle, their culture, so that we can show the world as to how they proudly and happily live their lives despite being in remote regions," Munda said while speaking to the media in New Delhi on completion of 9 years of Modi government.

Speaking about the other initiatives taken by his ministry, Munda infromed that a similar programme to test and collect data of tribespeople on sickle cell disease. For this initiative too, the government is trying to bring interventions to decrease prevalence of the disease among the tribal populations.

It has embarked upon a mass testing drive for this, with a target of screening around 9 crore people by 2025-26. About reports that the mission by March this year had achieved just 1% of its target of 1 crore people for 2022-23, the minister claimed that work on this front is now progressing rapidly and that the mission for "eliminating" the desease from India by 2047 is achievable.

Munda also spoke of the rapid pace at which Eklavya Model Residential Schools (EMRSs) for tribal students had been sanctioned by the PM Modi-led government. The number of sanctioned schools has gone up from 167 to 690 since 2014, with over 3 lakh students enrolled at the schools. But only 401 of the schools are functional, many in buildings not their own.

The Minister also said that the government had solved teacher shortages at EMRSs by creating the National Education Society for Tribal Students (NESTS) to centrally monitor their administration and now recruit teachers as well. The government has already announced this and said 38,800 teachers and support staff will be hired for EMRSs soon.

Munda highlighted the Pradhan Mantri Adi Adarsh Gram Yojana as another achievement. He said that under this scheme, over 36,000 tribal villages are being developed to become model villages. He also spoke of the overall increase in budget allocation for tribal affairs in the last nine years, emphasising that the allocation, put together with the Scheduled Tribe Component Fund (STCF), was the highest it has ever been at over Rs 1.3 lakh-crore.

"We are not looking at development from a political lens. This clearly shows our government's commitment to bring public facilities even to the most marginalised among us who are yet to secure participation in our democratic processes," the minister concluded.