B.K. Roy Burman's concept of 'Buffer Zone'

The idea

Roy Burman, a leading applied anthropologist of tribal India, argued that isolated or PVTG-like communities need a protected ecological and social margin. Inside the core, customary land, shifting cultivation or foraging, and ritual geography should continue. Around it, a buffer of mixed use — regulated minor forest produce, limited roads, no heavy industry — would absorb contact. Outside, the ordinary market and state could operate.

The concept sits with Elwin’s protective philosophy and against a sudden Ghurye-style assimilation. It also sits with later national park language (core–buffer–transition), which Roy Burman did not want to become an excuse to evict people from the core. For him the tribal village is the core to be buffered, not a trespasser in a tiger reserve.

Use and criticism

Planners used buffer talk for North-Eastern and Andaman contact policy and for industrial belts in Jharkhand and Odisha. In practice, buffers were often drawn on paper after a lease was granted, or they became a police line. Xaxa and mining ethnography show that a buffer without PESA, FRA and Samata title is only a delay of alienation. Wildlife buffers can criminalise tendu and grazing. Roy Burman’s point remains: contact must be paced and spatially organised, or vulnerability becomes dispossession.