Back to Events of Week No. 2: Monday 10th January 2022 to Sunday 16th January 2022

Monday
10
JAN

02:00 PM

Tribal Policy in Independent India

Prof. Virginius Xaxa, Institute for Human Development, New Delhi (Indien)

As per the 2011 census, 705 tribes inhabit different states and union territories of India. They are enumerated at 104 million constituting 8.6 percent of the total population. Though they are numerically small, they are enormously diverse in terms of language, size of the population, level of development and ecological settings. On the eve of independence, they have been the most underdeveloped segment of India’s population. The scenario is no different today. They represent a disproportionate share of the people living below the poverty line, low literacy rate, and poor health indicators. However, if one were to locate them in the regional context one finds a great deal of variation in development indicators. The lecture will address this problem and attempt to explain why tribes in a certain region have done well whereas others have not. It will examine if this is to do with policy.

Professor Virginius Xaxa is currently visiting Professor at the Institute for Human Development (IHD), New Delhi. Prior to this, he was Professor of Eminence and Bharat Ratna Lokapriya Gopinath Bordoloi Chair at Tezpur University (2016–2018). He was also Professor and Deputy Director of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Guwahati Campus (2011–2016). He taught Sociology at the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi (1990–2011), and North Eastern Hill University, Shillong (1978–1990). He obtained MA in Sociology from Pune University and Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur. He is the author of Economic Dualism and Structure of Class: A Study in Plantation and Peasant Settings in North Bengal (Cosmo, 1997) and State, Society and Tribes: Issues in Post-Colonial India (Pearson, 2008), co-author of Tea Plantation Labour in India (Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 1996) and co-editor of Social Exclusion and Adverse Inclusion: Development and Deprivation of Adivasis in India (OUP, 2012), Work, Institutions and Sustainable Livelihood: Issues and Challenges of Transformation (Palgrave, 2017) and Employment and Labour Market in North-East India: Interrogating Structural Changes (Routledge, 2019). He was also the Chairman of the High Level Committee on Socio-Economic, Health and Educational Status of Tribal Communities of India, Government of India (2014).

https://bit.ly/3IuCCVK ;
Meeting id: 812 5314 7896 ;
Pass code: TheoryM21

Streaming / Video URL

https://bit.ly/3IuCCVK

Organizer

Südasien-Institut, Abteilung Politische Wissenschaft

Homepage Organizer

http://www.uni-heidelberg.de/sai/pol/index.html

Contact

polsai@sai.uni-heidelberg.de