(a) Write an account on the contribution of Verrier Elwin in developing policies for the tribal populations in post-independent…

(a) Verrier Elwin and post-independence tribal policy

Introduction: Verrier Elwin (1902-1964) after 1947 turned his central Indian ethnography into an official philosophy of tribal administration for the North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA), now Arunachal Pradesh.

Positions: Elwin, Deputy Director of the Anthropological Survey of India in the late 1940s, took Indian citizenship in 1954 and was appointed by Nehru Adviser for Tribal Affairs, NEFA.

From isolation to integration: 'The Baiga' (1939) had proposed a protective 'national park' for tribes, which G. S. Ghurye's 'The Aborigines - So-Called - and Their Future' (1943) attacked as denationalising, against N. K. Bose's 'Hindu method of tribal absorption'. Elwin repudiated isolation for integration: neither isolation nor assimilation, but development along a people's own lines.

'A Philosophy for NEFA' (1957; 2nd edition 1959): Nehru's foreword to it set out the tribal Panchsheel: (i) develop along the lines of their own genius, nothing imposed, arts and culture encouraged; (ii) rights in land and forest respected; (iii) tribals trained for administration and development, with few outsiders; (iv) no over-administration or multiplicity of schemes, working through their own institutions; (v) results judged by the quality of human character evolved, not statistics or money spent. Nehru enunciated the principles; Elwin supplied the philosophy.

Measures in NEFA: An anthropologically trained Indian Frontier Administrative Service; retention of the inner line under the Bengal Eastern Frontier Regulation, 1873; schooling in local languages and materials; government through village councils; restraint on traders and missions. 'Myths of the North-East Frontier of India' (1958) was meant to build tribal self-respect. Nationally, he chaired the Committee on Special Multipurpose Tribal Blocks (report 1960), which faulted uniform, target-driven schemes and urged a tribal bias in development.

Appraisal: Critics called it museumisation delaying political participation; Ramachandra Guha's 'Savaging the Civilized' (1999) records the romanticism and the shift from it. Above all the Panchsheel stayed declaratory: displacement, land alienation and forest exclusion (Xaxa Committee, 2014) show how little of principles (ii) and (v) was realised.

Conclusion: Elwin gave independent India its most coherent statement of tribal policy, whose principles outlive the practice that departed from them.

(b) Why somatometric and somatoscopic classifications failed

Introduction: From Risley to Guha, Indian anthropometry produced mutually incompatible racial maps; the failure lay in typological method, not measurement.

The classifications: H. H. Risley (Census 1901) derived seven types largely from the nasal index, claiming caste rank varied inversely with it. J. H. Hutton (Census 1931) offered a stratigraphy of migrations. B. S. Guha (1931 Census, published 1935) proposed six elements, Negrito, Proto-Australoid, Mongoloid, Mediterranean, Western Brachycephals and Nordic, from cephalic and nasal indices, stature. Eickstedt, S. S. Sarkar and D. N. Majumdar produced others; none agreed.

Typological fallacy: The schemes assumed discrete 'pure' ancestral types of which living people were approximations, whereas populations vary continuously and clinally, with within-group variability exceeding between-group difference; the UNESCO Statements on Race (1950, 1951) discarded typological race.

Technical failures: Trait weighting was arbitrary. Cephalic index, nasal index, stature and pigmentation are non-concordant. The traits are polygenic and plastic, as Franz Boas (1912) showed for immigrant head form. Somatoscopic scoring is observer-dependent, and samples were small, non-random and statistically untested.

Conceptual conflation: Race was equated with caste, language and region: 'Aryan' and 'Dravidian', linguistic labels, were read as biology serving colonial caste enumeration.

What replaced them: Blood groups, haemoglobin variants and G6PD deficiency distributed discordantly with the racial types; genomics revealed an admixture cline of Ancestral North Indian and Ancestral South Indian (Reich et al., Nature, 2009). The Anthropological Survey of India's People of India project shifted the unit from race to endogamous community.

Conclusion: Indian variation is clinal and endogamy-structured, which no typology could capture; racial typology, not measurement, failed.

(c) The Niyamgiri movement: a critical appraisal

Introduction: The Niyamgiri hills of Kalahandi and Rayagada districts, Odisha, are home to the Dongria Kondh, a PVTG who call themselves jharnia and worship Niyam Raja at Niyam Dongar.

The conflict: Odisha Mining Corporation, with Vedanta/Sterlite, sought hilltop bauxite for the Lanjigarh alumina refinery; the Niyamgiri Suraksha Samiti under Lado Sikaka resisted.

Legal trajectory: The N. C. Saxena Committee (2010) found violations of the Forest Rights Act, 2006 and environmental law, and Jairam Ramesh refused Stage-II clearance in August 2010. In Orissa Mining Corporation v. MoEF (18 April 2013) the Supreme Court held that whether mining affected religious, cultural and habitat rights was for the Gram Sabhas to decide under the FRA read with PESA, 1996 and Articles 25-26; it did not cancel the lease itself.

Outcome: In 2013 the twelve designated Gram Sabhas unanimously rejected mining, and MoEF refused final clearance in January 2014; in May 2016 the Supreme Court declined Odisha's plea for fresh Gram Sabha votes.

Achievements: Free, prior and informed consent, consistent with UNDRIP (2007), was operationalised, and a sacred landscape, L. P. Vidyarthi's nature-man-spirit complex in legal form, became a protectable interest.

Limits: Only twelve villages voted; the Lanjigarh refinery and plains displacement remain; some activists faced Maoist-link allegations, raising doubts about how free consent was. The principle has since been weakened: the Forest (Conservation) Rules, 2022 let forest clearance advance before Gram Sabha consent is secured, and Samatha (1997) and LARR Act section 41 are unevenly enforced. Among some sixty million development-displaced since 1947, about forty per cent tribal (Walter Fernandes's estimate), it is an exception.

Niyamgiri is India's strongest precedent for community consent, yet fragile, because its principle has not been institutionalised beyond the case.