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Mocking Adivasi Concerns

There is a new “plan” for the scheduled tribes, but the adivasis themselves will have no say.

Alienation from the forest and its resources, alienation from cultivable land and alienation from the State underlie the anger of the adivasis in India’s heartland. This is not a new or startling observation. Adivasi mass organisations, the more sensitive administrators, political organisations with their ears to the ground and scholars who have studied India’s autochthonous peoples have been saying this for decades. Why, the Indian state itself has enacted laws to give back to the adivasis a measure of control over their lives and livelihoods. The Provisions of the Panchayats (Extension to the Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996 (PESA) and the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 (more commonly known as the Forest Rights Act) are two pieces of legislation that were explicitly drafted over the past 15 years to lessen adivasi alienation. As recently as 24 July 2010 Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said at the National Development Council about the concerns of the adivasis, “First, we must recognise that good governance alone gives people a sense of participation and empowerment. In this context, effective implementation of the Forest Rights Act and…PESA are of critical importance. Failure to implement these laws in letter and spirit reduces the credibility of our commitment to bring development to these neglected areas.”

Yet, even as it pays lip service to empower members of the scheduled tribes (ST) the central government is joining hands with the state governments to concentrate more powers in the hands of the district administration and is leaving untouched the many sources of adivasi disaffection. A good example is the “Integrated Action Plan” and institutional arrangements for its implementation that the union cabinet approved recently for 60 ST and backward districts.

The context is New Delhi’s solution for dealing with, what it calls, “Left Wing Extremism” (LWE) rather than adivasi disaffection. Union Finance Minister Pranab Kumar Mukherjee, in his 2010-11 Budget speech, had spoken about the Planning Commission being asked to prepare a plan to address the development concerns of 33 “LWE-affected” districts (defined as districts where more than 20% of the police stations had seen Maoist attacks).

The Planning Commission, which two years ago had constituted an expert committee that had prepared the excellent report, Deve­lopment Challenges in Extremist Affected Areas, showed a far better understanding of what drives adivasi concerns. Its proposal for the IAP looked at a number of socio-economic indicators rather than just LWE-affected districts. The districts with an ST population of more than 24%, forest cover of more than 30% and a poverty rate of more than 50% were to be included under the proposed plan and the number of districts correspondingly increased to 60.

Yojana Bhavan’s development package was a mammoth Rs 13,000 crore to be spread over four years between 2010-11 and 2013-14 but conditional, at its core, on implementation of three sets of measures, all meant to facilitate adivasi empowerment. One, the states had to effectively implement PESA and transfer resources and functions to elected local bodies. Since its enactment in 1997, PESA has remained by and large a law on paper with few states showing any commitment to empower panchayats in the scheduled (adivasi) areas. Two, since an important reason for adivasi discontent is the paltry income they receive from collection and sale of minor forest produce (MFP), whose trade has been nationalised in most states, the power to transact business in MFP was to be transferred under PESA to the gram panchayats so that the adivasis could receive more than just the collection charges. Three, the implementation of the Forest Rights Act, which was to confer landownership titles on adivasis, has been uneven and often the pattas distributed are not accepted as negotiable instruments for receiving subsidies or accessing bank loans. Therefore, the states were to ensure speedier, effective and meaningful implementation of the Act and distribution of full legal titles.

It is apparent that the underlying thinking in the Planning Commission’s proposal was to work towards greater empowerment of the adivasis and thereby reduce their sense of alienation. This is in some sense consistent with the 2008 report of the expert group which again placed less emphasis on security measures and more on addressing the deep-rooted causes of ­adivasi anger.

Yet, what has the central government decided? Amazingly, last month it approved the Integrated Action Plan that would provide Rs 55 crore over two years to each of the 60 adivasi/backward districts and be implemented by, guess what, an unelected ­district-level committee consisting of the collector, superin­tendent of police, and the forest officer. No measures to implement PESA and the Forest Rights Act better, no measures for the adivasis to have greater control over the lives and livelihoods and no measures to empower local bodies! Instead, the three most powerful, often oppressive, agents of the State in the district are to formulate, implement and monitor a “development” plan!

This is not about the size of the IAP, though its reduction from Rs 13,000 crore over four years to Rs 3,300 crore over two years must raise questions about the centre’s seriousness as well. It is more about what the central and state governments think about the causes of unrest in the adivasi areas and about their commitment to lessen the feeling of alienation and disempowerment. By doing little to strengthen adivasi control over their lives, while strengthening the unelected bureaucrats the government is clearly showing little respect for the adivasis themselves. May be this should not surprise us, for despite all the lip service to empowerment, the State really does think the adivasi issue can be settled purely by administrative diktat, i e, ultimately by a military solution. Why then go through this charade of addressing the “development deficit” in the adivasi heartlands?