Revision summary
Roy Burman proposed a buffer between tribal habitat and full industrial or fortress-forest pressure. The core should keep customary land and livelihood; the margin should regulate contact. Wildlife core–buffer maps are a cousin, but must not evict the village from the core. Without FRA and PESA rights the buffer is only delay. The idea continues Elwin’s caution against sudden assimilation.
Model answer
Copper italics in this answer — like this — are the key facts. Each one is unpacked in the Facts & figures rail.
Introduction
B. K. Roy Burman used buffer zone for a belt of land and livelihood that should stand between a tribal habitat and the full force of mines, plantations, highways and reserved-forest fortress conservation. It is a development-anthropology idea, not only a wildlife map.
Body
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.
Flow diagram
Conclusion
- Roy Burman’s buffer zone is a spatial ethic of tribal development: a living core, a regulated margin, and a delayed industrial front. Without rights in the core, the buffer is only a map.
Quick related
Students also ask
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Agricultural practices of the Apatani
Next question on this syllabus topic (2024 · Q5(c)). View answer →
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Is a buffer zone a national park?
Not necessarily. Roy Burman meant a development buffer around a community. Parks later used similar rings, sometimes against the same community.
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Does a buffer replace land rights?
No. Title and Gram Sabha consent are the legal core; the buffer is a spatial policy around them.
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