With the 2021 Census indefinitely delayed, the government’s attempt at using the PM Gati Shakti portal to estimate the total population of Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTG) across the country is hitting one wall after another.
This has led the government to arrive at three different estimates for the total PVTG population in the last three months — around 28 lakh in November, 36.75 lakh in mid-January, and 44.64 lakh by the end of January. Officials say this figure is not final.
The information on population is crucial to the implementation of the government’s ₹24,000 crore PM-JANMAN package for PVTGs. This data is needed for accurate gap assessment and to sanction certain infrastructure projects that have a population criteria that need to be met.
When the package was launched in November 2023 to ensure that PVTG villages had all basic facilities and infrastructure, the government said there were around 28 lakh PVTG people in the country. The government said its goal was to plug infrastructural gaps in the around 22,500 habitations they occupy.
But by the time the operational guidelines were released in January 2024, the Tribal Affairs Ministry claimed the total population of PVTGs stood at 36.75 lakh. By the end of January, the government had further revised the total population tally — pegging it at 44.64 lakh as of January 31, 2024. Neither of these estimates had included data from Bihar and Manipur, with officials saying that population of some habitations are yet to be fed into the portal for the rest of the States as well.
“We have to constantly keep revising the population data as and when it is rationalised,” one district official in the south of Jharkhand told The Hindu, while another one in Chhattisgarh said there is not much uniformity in how different States and districts were estimating the population figures.
Some districts are using population data from ration distribution charts, others are using data from as far back as the 2011 Census or surveys conducted in 2015 by government institutes; some districts have designed detailed surveys and have conducted a near-headcount of the PVTG population as recently as 2023 while others have only estimated it based on household and habitation surveys, according to the district officials working on the project in Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Rajasthan.
A government official explained that most of the population data being gathered on the portal was based on “habitation-level surveys”, insisting that it was “not a Census-like exercise”.
“What this entailed was for district officials to visit the habitations, verify that PVTG families living there and estimate their population there so that the specific area can be marked out as a PVTG area on the PM Gati Shakti portal for projects to be sanctioned,” an official said. Some infrastructure projects like building connecting roads and anganwadis under the JANMAN package require a population criteria to be met before being sanctioned.
The Tribal Affairs ministry has told all Ministries working on PM-JANMAN that the population data on the portal is not meant to be static and that it is subject to revision when each Ministry or department is on the ground to verify and rationalise the data.
“We are not saying all gaps have been identified. But we are at least on our way. The data updation is continuous and as and when we keep identifying more gaps, we will plug them. What we have now is monumental given where we started just six months ago,” a senior Ministry official said.
So far, under the PM-JANMAN package, the government has been able to sanction building of 1,207 km out of the targeted 8,000 km of roads; 450 of the targeted 1,000 multipurpose centres; and electrification of a little over 87,000 PVTG households. The latest available government data from January shows that there are at least 12.70 lakh PVTG households across the country.
Based on assessment available at the time, the JANMAN package has accounted for building 4.9 lakh pucca homes, for which the first instalment was released to 1 lakh beneficiaries this January. In addition, close to 1,000 Anganwadi centres have been sanctioned so far out of the targeted 2,500.
The entire ₹24,000 crore allocation for the JANMAN package is meant to be spent over a period of three years. Each of the nine Ministries attached to the project have set aside funds from their respective Scheduled Tribes Component for this purpose. So far, projects sanctioned under the package amount to a little over ₹4,700 crore.
