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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

India's bureaucracy has failed its forest dwellers -Sanjiv Phansalkar
-VillageSquare.in

The country’s particularly vulnerable tribal groups, who live mostly in dwindling forests, have not been well served by the government’s administrative machinery, but have slowly been reduced to virtual serfdom

Max Weber, the 19thcentury German sociologist, had extolled the virtues of bureaucracy. India used to celebrate its steel frame governing the country for decades, and which continues to rule us till date, though it is unfashionable to sing its virtues any more. Interventions and solutions, which are applicable to large numbers of people, can be well implemented through huge bureaucratic structures.

If the interventions are well designed and the implementing bureaucracy is diligent, then such solutions do provide excellent results. India’s enviable record in conducting mega-scale elections point to the efficacy of mechanically but efficiently implemented processes uniformly managed at an extraordinarily large scale.

People with special needs

But where the need is to engage with people with special needs, the bureaucracy appears to become an ineffective machine, and when such people with special needs are in a large number of locations scattered over a wide region and when in each of these locations they are swamped and surrounded by ordinary people who do not have those needs, the bureaucratic apparatus becomes singularly inappropriate.

There are at least three classes of rural people falling in the category. The first and perhaps the largest class is people with disabilities (PwD), including those who are now so remarkably called Divyangs, persons with development disorders and persons suffering from mental disorders.

The second class is of people who have for generations remained nomads and been living at the fringe of the main society. The third and perhaps the least visible are the persons belonging to particularly vulnerable tribal groups (PVTG).

One can fault the government with neither their intention nor the financial resources they allocate for the wellbeing of the people in these three classes. Yet the results are, to put it mildly, disappointing. In my view, the problem lies with reliance on a bureaucratic apparatus, which simply is not designed to deal with people with special needs. We will look at each of the three instances. Let us first look at people of the PVTG.

New classification

Serious attention was paid to the status of the PVTG at the behest of the National Advisory Council (NAC) of the chairperson of the erstwhile United Progressive Alliance government. The government framed policies in 2012-3 based on recommendations of the NAC. As many as 75 tribal groups with a total population of about 2.7 million were classified as PVTG. This small number of people is scattered over a large number of locations in over a dozen states of the country.

NAC defined PVTG as a group of people who practiced pre-agricultural livelihoods, who lived in forests, who eked out an existence through the subsistence mode and who exhibited stagnant if not falling populations.

Some of the better-known groups among the PVTG are the Baigas of eastern Madhya Pradesh, Birhors of Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand and West Bengal, Bondas of Bonda Hills in Malkangiri, Jarawas of Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Irulas of Tamil Nadu, Kolams of Maharashtra and Sahariyas of northwestern Madhya Pradesh.

Where they can, the people of the PVTG still live in forests and practice primitive forms of agriculture. However, in the main, the pressure of population growth of other communities has reduced area under dense forests and rendered the mode of living of the PVTG increasingly unviable.

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