Budget 2023: Development Action Plan for the Schedule Tribes announced

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With the objective to sharpen the focus to reaching the last mile, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on 1st February 2023 announced the PM Primitive Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTG) Development Mission in Budget 2023.

The mission is launched to improve the social and economic conditions of the PVTGs. The mission has a sanctioned amount of Rs. 15,000 crore for the coming 3 years. The mission will help these families with basic facilities such as housing, clean drinking water & sanitation, and livelihood opportunities among others.

As per the 2011 Census, the Schedule Tribes account for 10.42 million representing 8.6% of the country’s population. Tribes are a group of people having a distinct language, culture, lifestyle and socio-economic condition and living in a specific geographical area. The tribes reside in interior forests, remote and inaccessible areas or in the outskirts of forests and hilly regions.

There are a total of 75 PVTGs out of 705 Scheduled Tribes, spread over 17 States and Union Territory. The PVTG of Sahariyas has the highest population of 4,50,217 and the state of Odisha has the highest number of PVTGs.

Development action plan for the Schedule Tribes:

Under the development action plan for the Schedule Tribes (ST), the Finance Minister has announced the recruitment of 38,800 teachers and support staff for the 740 Eklavya Model Residential Schools (EMRS). She said that this would be done in the next 3 years and would serve 3.5 lakh tribal students.

The EMRS was launched in 1997, to provide upper primary, secondary and senior secondary level education to students in tribal-dominated areas. In all, 288 schools were sanctioned then, today there are 740 of them.

The Ministry of Tribal Affairs is the nodal Ministry for overall policy, planning and coordination of programmes for the development of the STs. The Ministry was set up in 1999 after the bifurcation of the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment with the objective of providing a more focused approach to the integrated socio-economic development of the STs.