Status of Tribals

Tribals in India present a significant degree of cultural and ethnic diversity. They differ in their socio-economic levels as well as in their behavioural patterns. Moreover, tribal situation in the country poses peculiar problems of development, not encountered in other areas. The peculiarities can be broadly summed up as geographical, demographic, socio-cultural and explorative. Shyness of contact with community at large has been the most distinguishing feature of the tribal population which follows from geographical isolation of the vast majority of the tribal population in the country. Interestingly, there are 550 Scheduled Tribes communities with several sub-groups and a large chunk of tribal population has been wrongly included in Scheduled Castes communities and also a large number of tribals are still to be scheduled.