Author: Mehendale, Archana, Bangalore 2003, Child Rights International Network: www.crin.org | see backup file below
Submission to the Committee on the Rights of the Child For the Day of General Discussion on “Isolated Communities and Ignored Claims: Tribal Children’s Right to Education in India”. Tribal communities in India have been historically deprived of access to resources and opportunities, including education. According to the author, unless the government undertakes urgent steps to address this issue, its proclamations on child rights would remain empty rhetoric.
Excerpt
Indigenous communities of India are commonly referred to as tribal or adivasi communities and are recognised as Scheduled Tribes under the Constitution of India. Although the Constitution does not define Scheduled Tribes as such, it designates these communities as those which are scheduled in accordance with Article 342 of the Constitution. According to Article 342 of the Constitution, the Scheduled Tribes are the tribes or tribal communities or part of or groups within these tribes and tribal communities which have been declared as such by the President through a public notification. The criteria followed for specification of a community, as scheduled tribe are indications of primitive traits, distinctive culture, geographical isolation, shyness of contact with the community at large, and backwardness. At present, 533 tribes in India have been notified under Article 342 of the Constitution with the largest number of 62 tribes belonging to the State of Orissa.
As per the 1991 Census, the Scheduled Tribes (ST) account for 67.76 million representing 8.08 percent of the country’s population. Of this, 1.32 million (1.95%) belong to Primitive Tribal Groups (PTG) who are more marginalised than the ST population. The ST population is estimated to have reached 88.8 million in 2001 which is 8.6% of the country’s total population in 2001. The Scheduled Tribes are spread across the country and reside mainly in forest and hilly regions. The proportion of Scheduled Tribes within general population varies across States/Union Territories and indicates heavy concentration in certain parts such as Mizoram (94.7%), Lakshwadeep (93.2%), Meghalaya (85.5%), Dadra and Nagar Haveli (78.9%). States of Kerala (1.1%), Tamil Nadu (1%) and Uttar Pradesh (0.2%) have a low percentage of Scheduled Tribe population in comparison to the general population. Since Independence, the percentage of ST population has steadily increased following the growth in general population.
Table 1. Schedule Tribe Population over the years […]
Tribal communities in India have been historically deprived of access to resources and opportunities, including the opportunity to get educated. […]
For such historically deprived communities, providing access to education is simply not enough, the government has to take a proactive role in creating overall conditions and opportunities that will facilitate their transition and breaking of the intergenerational cycle of poverty and illiteracy. A sensitive cadre of teachers and bureaucracy is definitely required to make the difference. At another level, educational deprivation must be seen in the context of overall deprivation of the community and hence emphasis must be placed on improving the situation of tribal communities in general. Restoring land and livelihoods, empowering women, providing basic civic amenities such as fuel, water and sanitation are preconditions to advancements of rights of tribal children. Unless the government undertakes urgent steps to address these issues, its proclamations on child rights would remain examples of empty rhetoric and its actions would effectively continue to exclude those already sidelined. Following the increasing gap between the rich and the poor in the country, the gap between the tribal and non-tribal children is also widening rapidly, thereby further isolating the isolated. Respecting their claims at the outset should set the ball rolling in the right direction.
Source: “Isolated Communities and Ignored Claims: Tribal Children’s Right to Education in India” | Resource Centre
Address : https://resourcecentre.savethechildren.se/content/library/documents/isolated-communities-and-ignored-claims-tribal-children%E2%80%99s-right-education-
Date Visited: 27 January 2021
Backup file accessed 5 December 2012: “Isolated Communities and Ignored Claims- Tribal Children’s Right to Education in India by Archana Mehendale 2012.pdf
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Right to education handbook – Unesco
Civil and political rights
Even where the constitutional and legislative framework does not provide for the remedies for violations of the right to education, proactive courts may nonetheless render the right justiciable through innovative interpretations of civil and political rights which are guaranteed. For
example, in Mohini Jain v Karnataka which concerned the charging of ‘capitation fee’ by the private educational institutions, the Supreme Court of India held that although the right to education education was not explicitly guaranteed by the Constitution, it is essential to the realization of the fundamental right to life and human dignity guaranteed
by the Constitution. […]Court decisions recognizing a violation of the right to education are important whether they concern individual cases (e.g. in the case of
pregnant girls excluded from schools) or society in general (e.g. Brown in the US). However, court decisions have a stronger impact when they
bring structural and policy changes that create the condition for the full enjoyment of the right to education.As underlined by Siri Gloppen: ‘enforcement resulting in policy change — if
implemented — can easily outweigh the impact of thousands of individual cases.’ For instance, it has been estimated that 350,000 additional girls are now going to school in India thanks to the midday school meal scheme implemented as a result of right to food litigation brought before the
Indian Supreme Court.
Source: Chapter 8 pp. 244-245 & 251, Right to education handbook (Unesco)
URL: https://en.unesco.org/news/what-right-education-handbook
Date accessed: 6 February 2019
What is the Right to education handbook?
05 February 2019
Education is a fundamental human right of every woman, man and child. However, millions are still deprived of educational opportunities every day, many as a result of social, cultural and economic factors.
UNESCO and the Right to Education Initiative (link is external) (RTE) recently released the Right to education handbook, a key tool for those seeking to understand and advance that right. It is also an important reference for people working towards achieving Sustainable Development Goal 4 by offering guidance on how to leverage legal commitment to the right to education. […]Who should use this handbook?
The handbook was developed to assist all stakeholders who have a crucial role to play in the promotion and implementation of the right to education. This includes:
– State officials, to ensure that education policies and practices are better aligned with human rights.
– Civil servants, policy-makers, ministers, and the ministry of education staff, officials working in ministries and departments of justice, development, finance, and statistics, as well as National Human Rights Institutions.
– Parliamentarians, their researchers and members of staff will find this handbook useful in evaluating and formulating education, human rights, and development legislation, and in implementing international human rights commitments to national law.
– Judges, magistrates, clerks, and lawyers and other judicial officials can use the material to explain the legal obligations of the state and how to apply them.
– Civil society including NGOs, development organizations, academics, researchers, teachers and journalists will benefit from this handbook as it includes guidance on how to incorporate the right to education in programmatic, research, and advocacy work. […]
Source: Right to education handbook (Unesco)
URL: https://en.unesco.org/news/what-right-education-handbook
Date visited: 6 February 2019
“The smart boy or clever girl who is deprived of the opportunity of schooling, or who goes to a school with dismal facilities (not to mention the high incidence of absentee teachers), not only loses the opportunities he or she could have had, but also adds to the massive waste of talent that is a characteristic of the life of our country.” – Nobel Awardee Amartya Sen in The Argumentative Indian (Penguin Books, 2005), p. 344 | Find this and other books published in India >>
Related: Tribal Children’s Right to Education | Childhood | Ekalavya (Eklavya, Eklabya), EMR & Factory schools | Childrens rights: UNICEF India >>
Human trafficking is a crime. To report in India, call Shakti Vahini
+91-11-42244224, +91-9582909025 or the national helpline Childline on 1098.
“As per a study on human trafficking, the state of Jharkhand has emerged as India’s trafficking hub with thousands of tribal women and girls being trafficked out of the state each year to Delhi, Punjab, Haryana and beyond [while] human traffickers are also involved in many cases of missing children.” – The Wire | Shakti Vahini | Tourism locations | Adivasi tribal bondage slavery trafficking (Safe search) >>
“Childline 1098 is a 24×7 emergency, free phone outreach for children in distress. It is one of the world’s biggest emergency helpline services dedicated to children, and is considered to be among the country’s largest emergency response systems” – The Hindu, 17 April 2022 >>
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See also
Adverse inclusion | Casteism | Rural poverty
Demographic Status of Scheduled Tribe Population of India (Census figures 2011)
Fact checking | Figures, census and other statistics
Human Rights Commission (posts) | www.nhrc.nic.in (Government of India)
Search tips | Names of tribal communities, regions and states of India
“What is the Forest Rights Act about?” – Campaign for Survival and Dignity
“Who are Scheduled Tribes?” – Government of India (National Commission for Scheduled Tribes, NCST)
- Ekalavya* Residential School Scheme (EMR): a network of boarding schools where tribal children are to be educated in accordance with rules and syllabi provided by the government; such schools are being designated as “Eklavya Model Residential School (EMR)” with the objective of empowering students “to be change agent, beginning in their school, in their homes, in their village and finally in a large context.” – Government Guidelines 2010 | Backup >>
- Residential School and Ashram School
In some regions there are similar “Residential Schools” and “Ashram Schools” for tribal children, as in Tripura where they are managed by a society called “Tripura Tribal Welfare Residential Educational Institutions Society (TTWREIS)” – Tribal Welfare Department, Government of Tripura - Factory schools “exist to turn tribal and indigenous children – who have their own language and culture – into compliant workers-of-the-future. The world’s largest Factory School stated that it turns ‘Tax consumers into tax payers, liabilities into assets’.” – survivalinternational.org/factoryschools | Learn more >>
Up-to-date information about these and related issues: Safe custom search engine >>
* Ekalavya (Eklavya, Eklabya): the name of a legendary archer prodigy “who, being a Nishada [Sanskrit Niṣāda, “tribal, hunter, mountaineer, degraded person, outcast”], had to give his thumb as a fee to the brahmin guru thus terminating his skill as an archer.” – Romila Thapar (“The epic of the Bharatas”) | Read the full paper here | Backup download link (pdf) >>
Note: “Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group” amounts to genocide, which the United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention defines as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” (Article II, d & e)
Learn more about Childrens rights: UNICEF India | Ekalavya (Eklavya, Eklabya), EMR & Factory schools | Rights of Indigenous Peoples >>