In 2004 the Ministry for Tribal Affairs in India proposed a new ‘National Policy on Scheduled

Tribes’, a venture that has not been undertaken since Independence. The document is still a

draft; the Ministry has posted it on its homepage for feedback from interested parties. The

policy, the Ministry states, ‘seeks to bring Scheduled Tribes into the mainstream of society

through a multi-pronged approach for their all-round development’. Judging from the

massive critique by tribal or indigenous peoples’ organisations, much of the problem stems

from this very aspiration