Revision summary
Tribal agricultural labourers are Adivasis who live mainly by farm wages. Forest law and land transfer produced that class. Low pay, bondage-like advances, and migration are the daily issues. FRA helps forest cultivators more than the landless farmhand. MGNREGA is a buffer when it is not captured.
Model answer
Copper italics in this answer — like this — are the key facts. Each one is unpacked in the Facts & figures rail.
Introduction
Tribal agricultural labourers are Adivasi households who live by wage work on others’ fields more than by their own plough. Land loss and seasonal migration are the core issues.
Body
How they were made
- Colonial forest reservation and landlord revenue turned many cultivators into labour on their old soil, a process Verrier Elwin recorded as dispossession rather than as lazy custom.
- After independence, moneylender and non-tribal land alienation continued in Fifth Schedule tracts despite transfer bans.
- FRA, 2006 aims at forest plots and commons. It often misses the purely landless labourer on private farms.
Present issues
- Low wages, delayed pay, and women paid less for the same harvest work.
- Bonded and attached labour survive as advance-against-harvest, which the Bonded Labour law names but does not always reach.
- Seasonal migration to brick kilns and cane belts, mapped in western India by Jan Breman, breaks schooling and union.
- MGNREGA is a partial counter. Capture by contractors still leaks the wage.
Limit
- Not every Scheduled Tribe household is a labourer. The note is about the land-poor, not the whole ST census.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD L[Land alienation] --> W[Wage labour] W --> M[Seasonal migration] F[FRA PESA MGNREGA] --> B[Incomplete buffer]
Conclusion
Tribal agricultural labour is the wage face of land alienation. Law on Schedule, forest rights, and rural work exists. Possession and a living wage still lag.
Quick related
Students also ask
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Major problems of nomadic and semi-nomadic groups
Next question on this syllabus topic (2022 · Q5(c)). View answer →
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Are all tribal farmers labourers?
No. Many still cultivate. This note is about the land-poor wage group.
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Does PESA fix farm wages?
PESA strengthens Gram Sabha over land and village resources. It does not set a national farm wage by itself.
Same topic · past papers
UPSC has asked this before
These previous-year questions sit on the same topic. Open one to practise the earlier ask.
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2022 · Q7(b) · Anthropology GS 2 · 15 marks
Discuss the issues and solutions related to the Scheduled Caste and the Scheduled Tribe populations in India
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