"How to marry a tribal and get trees," was the headline of a Bhopal based story that appeared in the Indian Express of January 23, 1997. Based on a secret document by the Bastar collector, Mr Rajgopal Naidu, to the Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister, the report showed how large tracts of forest land in Madhya Pradesh were being denuded by bureaucrats and forest mafia who were exploiting the tribals in the area.

Indigenous forest dwellers have malik makbuja or tribal ownership rights over forest trees. So government officials, timber traders and politicians, working closely, found various ways of grabbing trees or even whole forests for themselves.

One method was to marry tribal girls, get written permission from them to chop trees and clear vast tracks of jungle. Subsequently, many of these girls were abandoned.

"There are innumerable tribal women in Bastar who have technically more than a million rupees in their bank accounts and yet they live below the poverty line," said the Express correspondent.

The report pointed to the active involvement of Mr Naidu's senior and the Commissioner of the Division. Land belonging to scheduled castes and tribes can only be sold to those belonging to the same groups. But a revenue inspector had bought forestland in which there were trees worth Rs 7.5 million in the name of his wife. Since he was from the Revenue Department, he made a fresh map in which the land was not shown as tribal land, and chopped down the trees. An inquiry was ordered, but the Commissioner gave him the go-ahead while the case was pending in the lower courts.

The story was sensational not only because it highlighted the dubious manner in which large tracts of invaluable teak and sal forests were being cut illegally; it also revealed the large-scale exploitation of illiterate and poor tribals and scheduled castes by the upper crust of society. Three NGOs working for rights of tribals and forest dwellers took up the case and it was brought to the Supreme Court. The corrupt Commissioner was transferred, two Revenue Department officials dismissed from service and another suspended.

A week later, Mr Naidu too was transferred, but he finally received recognition for his courage in exposing the links between people in the government and the timber mafia. The honest government officials, some committed NGOs and the media had worked collectively to expose the corrupt system and the devious manner in which the tribals were being exploited.

Tribals, the indigenous people or forest dwellers, as well as the Dalits or scheduled castes, continue to be second class citizens in India. This is despite the government's efforts to eradicate the centuries of discrimination against them by reserving a quota of government jobs and seats in educational institutes.

There are 636 scheduled tribes, each with their own distinct culture and customs, constituting a population of more than 80 million and accounting for over eight per cent of the Indian population. Some of these tribes are primitive, and have remained isolated from any form of development.

Four of the tribes who live in the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean, south east of the Indian mainland, are on the verge of extinction. The Great Andamanese, the Jarawa, Onge and Sentinelese have lived and flourished in these islands for 20,000 years. About 150 years ago, they had an estimated population between them of at least 5,000. Today, the population of the four communities is not more than 500, though the total population of the islands is about 4 lakhs.

The population of the Onge is down to a hundred, the Great Andamanese just 30. And a trunk road cuts through the Jarawa forest homes, bringing in development that is proving disastrous for the tribe.

As people from the mainland harvest the exquisite timber of the islands, the tribal communities are being systematically alienated from their forests and their land. The migrants from the mainland brought with them infections and diseases to which a large number of tribals have succumbed. The debate on whether these indigenous people should be brought into the national mainstream or allowed to stay in their primitive state continues.

Tribals living in other parts of the country, most of them in Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Orissa, Bihar and Gujarat, are not being driven to extinction like the tribes of the Andamans but they are being pushed out of their shrinking forest homes. Large numbers have been displaced because of dam construction and other development projects in forest areas.

One of the major objections of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada movement) to the construction of a series of dams on the Narmada River is that thousands of tribals would be displaced in the states of Maharashtra, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh. The number of people displaced increases with the height of the dam.

Agitation against the dam has been going on for about 15 years, and it is because of the efforts of tribal activists like Medha Patkar that land-for-land compensation was agreed to by the Central Government. However, the Madhya Pradesh chief minister has gone on record to say that his state does not have sufficient land to give the 41,450 families who will be displaced in Madhya Pradesh alone.

The case has been fought through the courts and finally the Supreme Court of India has permitted the height of the dam to be raised.

The forested tribal hinterlands are also the areas where there is a rich reserve of minerals. According to the fifth schedule of the Constitution, tribal land cannot be leased out to non-tribals or to private companies for mining and industrial operations, but with the government's thrust on economic development, there is constant pressure to mine the homes of the tribals. But movements like the Narmada Bachao Andolan, Jan Vikas Andolan and NGOs like Ekta Parishad and the National Committee for Protection of Natural Resources maintain a check on government and private sector greed.

Yet it would be unfair to say the government has not made efforts for development of tribals. Special provisions have been made in the Indian Constitution for the protection and development of scheduled tribes. Promotion of educational and economic interests, protection from social injustice and exploitation are enshrined in various articles of tribal laws. Tribal land cannot be bought or sold except by the tribals. There is a National Commission at the centre to protect the interests of the scheduled tribes and since 1997, 100 residential schools for tribals have been set up. To encourage education of tribal girls, hostels have been established. Under the government's five-year plans they are being constantly renovated or expanded.

Tribal crafts and their traditional weaves are being propagated in a big way. A special shop in the heart of New Delhi sells exclusive tribal crafts. With the help of trained designers, tribal weaves and handmade fabrics are being promoted.

But the ground reality is that money and status continue to elude them. Literacy levels of the tribals are still very low - for men about 29 per cent and for women 18 per cent. Tribals work as cultivators and agricultural labour and according to the reports of the Planning Commission, 52 per cent of the rural and 41 per cent of the urban tribal population lives below poverty-line. That means they earn less than Rs 11,000 in a year, barely US $28. Some of the tribals in the poorer regions of Orissa still survive on roots and berries. Because of poor health facilities in the tribal pockets in which they live, malaria is a major killer.

There is a 7.5 per cent reservation in jobs for the tribals, but only 3.5 per cent of the posts have been filled. Tribals are missing in the higher echelons of administration. Fifty-two years after Independence, the tribals continue to be marginalised, which is why in October 1999, a full-fledged Ministry for Tribal Affairs was established at the Centre.

Tribal representation in Parliament is sizeable - 41 members in the Lok Sabha and 11 in the Rajya Sabha - but they have remained largely voiceless. Though reservation for SC and ST was initially meant to last 10 years, it was extended decade after decade because there has been poor implementation of the various laws and measures for their educational, social and economic advancement.

Since the early nineties, a group of tribal rights activists has come together under the leadership of the well known writer, Mahashweta Devi, to fight for the rights of some 60 million denotified tribals who are treated as criminals. They are routinely picked up by the police for questioning and beaten up. Many of them die in police custody.

This traditional bias against these tribes, a legacy of British rule, persists despite more than 50 years of government efforts to bring all tribals and other backward communities to parity with the more privileged members of society.

In 1871, the British passed the Criminal Tribes Act. It notified about 150 tribes as "criminal" and gave the police wide powers to deal with members of these tribes. They could restrict their movements and insist they report at police stations regularly. Independent India repealed the Act in 1952. That is why they are called denotified tribes (DNTs).

That term is rarely used, however. They are nearly always referred to as criminals. And it is this view, more than anything else, that defines the ways the DNTs live today, says Dilip D'Souza, who studied and wrote extensively on denotified tribes under a fellowship awarded to him by the National Foundation for India.

Some 150 years ago, a large number of these tribal communities were nomadic. They were considered useful, honourable people by settled societies with whom they came into contact. Many of them were petty traders who used to carry their wares on the backs of their cattle and sold or bartered goods, which ranged from honey, grain and rice to herbal medicines, in the villages through which they passed. Most nomadic people were also craftsmen, making and selling baskets, mats, brooms or earthen utensils.

But the media has been particularly insensitive to the plight of these tribals who continue to be treated and referred to as criminals. "Haryana to flush out criminal tribes" was the headline in the Indian Express of February 27, 1999, followed by "Bansilal orders crackdown on criminal tribes." The Tribune News Service on September 9, 1999, reported "48 Pardhi robbers from Guna held." The Express News Service of November 6, 1999, reported "Stone age robbers: Pardhis know no mercy."

Dr Meena Radhakrishnan, a social anthropologist at the Nehru Memorial Museum, says the spectre of the so-called criminal tribes has begun to haunt the middle class readers of newspapers in Delhi. There has been a marked increase in news stories which claim that a gruesome murder of an elderly couple was committed by a group of Sansis who robbed them of all their valuables. Or that a woman living alone was brutally done to death in the dead of night by a group of Pardhis. Television programmes on the tribes put fear in the minds of viewers, and the words "criminal tribes" have become synonymous with criminality of a mindless, violent kind. Radhakrishnan says the terror being fanned in the public mind has led to lynching of hapless Sansis or Pardhis, with no protest from others.

Most members of these tribes live in dismal conditions - often on the outskirts of a city - and are extremely poor. Even the educated members of these communities, who form the first generation of office goers or professionals, are looked upon suspiciously and insulted.

In 1998, after two custodial deaths of members of these tribes, Budhan Saber of Purulia District of West Bengal and Pinky Hari Kale of Satara District of Maharashtra, activists filed writ petitions in the Kolkota and Mumbai high courts respectively. They also informed the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) about the two deaths. Their efforts resulted in compensation being awarded to the families. The NHRC directed compensation be paid for the death of Kale and the Kolkota high court awarded compensation to the widow of Budhan Saber.

"While compensation is welcome and may act as a deterrent, the really revealing thing about these cases is what they say about attitudes towards DNTs," says Dilip D'Souza.

In February 2000, the NHRC recommended repeal of the Habitual Offenders Act, which had virtually replaced the Criminal Tribes Act after Independence. The Habitual Offenders Act has terrorised the tribes, for under its purview members of their communities are summarily picked up whenever there is unexplained crime.

Dr G N Devy, the secretary for the Denotified and Nomadic Tribes Rights Action Group, who is documenting tribal literature, says "None of the brave fights of the tribals against the British has ever been treated as part of the national struggle for freedom. From the Bihar uprising of 1778 to Lakshman Naik's revolt in Orissa in 1942, the tribals of India repeatedly rebelled against the British in the North East, Bengal, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh. In fact, the British had to accede to the demands of the Bhils and the Naiks after their revolt in 1809 and 1838."