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Home/Anthropology/Mains PYQ/2025/Paper II/Tribal Problems & Displacement
UPSC MainsAnthropology Optional Paper II 2025 10 Marks Model Answer Available

Impact of Urbanization and Industrialization on Tribal Communities — 2025 Paper II

Question · 2025 · Paper II · 10 Marks

Impact of urbanization and industrialization on tribal communities of India

Model Answer

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Introduction

Urbanisation and industrialisation connect tribal regions to markets, infrastructure and employment, but they also transform land relations, ecology and identity. Virginius Xaxa notes that tribal people often bear a disproportionate share of development-induced displacement while receiving a limited share of its benefits.

Major impacts

  • Land and livelihood loss: Mines, dams, industries and urban expansion acquire forests and agricultural land, producing displacement and depeasantisation. Walter Fernandes estimated that Scheduled Tribes constituted about 40 per cent of people displaced by development projects despite forming a far smaller share of India’s population, illustrating the unequal distribution of developmental costs. The mineral belts of Jharkhand, Odisha and Chhattisgarh exemplify this pattern.
  • Proletarianisation and migration: Former cultivators and forest users enter insecure construction, mine and domestic work. Weak skills and documentation increase exploitation and urban slum residence.
  • Ecological and health costs: Deforestation, polluted water, dust and occupational hazards undermine food systems and traditional medicine.
  • Social change: Kinship authority, dormitories, communal labour and customary institutions weaken; youth, women and elders experience change differently. Language loss and commodification of ritual may occur.
  • New opportunities: Roads, schools, health services, salaried work, markets for crafts and political associations can produce an educated tribal middle class, remittances and wider rights awareness.
  • Identity response: Integration may cause detribalisation, but it can also generate retribalisation - stronger ethnic organisations, cultural revival and demands for autonomy or compensation.

Critical assessment

The outcome depends on secure land titles, skill formation, gender, class and participation. Industrialisation is not inherently anti-tribal; exclusionary planning is. PESA, the Forest Rights Act and social-impact assessment require Gram Sabha participation, but implementation remains uneven.

Conclusion

Urban and industrial change is both enabling and dispossessing. A just transition must secure community forest and land rights, ensure prior participation, fair rehabilitation and benefit-sharing, and permit modern opportunities without enforced cultural assimilation.

Diagram to draw: Tribal habitat -> project/urban expansion -> displacement or opportunity -> differentiated social and cultural outcomes.

Selected authentic sources: Virginius Xaxa Committee Report (2014); Walter Fernandes on development-induced displacement; PESA 1996; Forest Rights Act 2006; Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition Act 2013.

2026 Make a critical appraisal of Niyamgiri movement against mining-induced displacement. 2026 Write an account on the prevalence of sickle cell disease among the tribal populations of India. What are the initiatives undertaken by the affected states to tackle with this disease? 2026 What are the major challenges tribal communities are facing in contemporary India? 2025 Examine the environmental and biocultural factors influencing the health of tribals of India.

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