Prime Minister Narendra Modi will on January 15 release ₹540 crore — the first instalment of funding — for pucca homes under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana-Gramin (PMAY-G) to one lakh Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group (PVTG) beneficiary families as part of the recently-launched PM-JANMAN package for the overall development of PVTG habitations.
A statement from the Ministry of Tribal Affairs said that Mr. Modi would release the first instalment via video conferencing at noon, following which he was set to interact with the PVTG beneficiaries of the package. Simultaneously, in 100 districts, officials of both the Centre and the respective State governments will distribute benefits under the package to Gram Panchayats and village chiefs.
In the two months since the Prime Minister launched the scheme on November 15, the government said it had sanctioned projects worth over ₹4,700 crore through nine Ministries under the PM-JANMAN package, which includes the first instalment for PMAY(G) homes for one lakh beneficiaries.
Further, the government has sanctioned the building of 1,207 km out of the targeted 8,000 km of roads in PVTG habitations; approved schemes to connect all left out PVTG households to the PM Jal Jeevan Mission; and sanctioned 916 anganwadi centres, 816 of which are expected to be operational by the end of this month.
It has also sanctioned energisation of over 6,500 PVTG households covering over 70,000 households, with 17 PVTG habitations (7,353 households) now already electrified. Moreover, 206 mobile towers, covering the range of over 500 PVTG villages have been sanctioned.
In addition to this, the government had on December 25 started an information and education campaign to register PVTG peoples for basic documentation like caste certificate, PM Jan Dhan Accounts, Aadhaar cards, Ayushmaan cards, etc., which would become essential for the beneficiaries to avail the benefits of the PM-JANMAN package.
In 22 days, the government said it had managed to get over two lakh registrations for Kisan Samman Nidhi Cards, 70,000 registrations for Aadhaar cards, 82,000 for Ayushman Cards, and 61,000 for PM Jan Dhan bank accounts. Further, over 90,000 community certificates have been issued to people in PVTG habitations.
But even as the government proceeds with the implementation of its PM-JANMAN package, it is yet to arrive at a final population count of PVTGs in the country even as per the 2011 Census numbers. While the government began planning for this project with an estimation of around 28 lakh PVTG people, which was close to the 2001 population, the most recent data compiled by the Tribal Affairs Ministry shows that the population of PVTGs is somewhere around 36 lakh (12 lakh households), which is based on data from the 2011 Census — this without data from Bihar and Manipur. And this data too is in a draft stage, as per the PM-JANMAN package guidelines released this month.
In 2022, while making submissions before a House panel on Social Justice and Empowerment, the Tribal Affairs Ministry had said that PVTGs were never counted separately in Censuses. As a result, they were waiting for the State governments to cull out this data from that of Scheduled Tribes, which was taking time and required a lot of reconciling and double-checking. As of available data at the time, the government had estimated PVTG population at around 17 lakh.
Even the population data published in January, the government said, might be subject to further revisions.
The Tribal Affairs Ministry has set a target of covering about seven lakh families in 22,000 PVTG habitations across 18 States and Union Territories, where it said schemes of various Ministries had not been able to address critical infrastructure needs, as per the package guidelines.
It has been designed so that 11 critical existing interventions, including the ones mentioned above, could be focused towards PVTG habitations by the nine respective Ministries, with the Tribal Affairs Ministry designated as the nodal Ministry.
The Union Cabinet has sanctioned a total of ₹24,104 crore for this package to be spent over the next three years, out of which ₹15,336 crore will be borne by the Centre and ₹8,768 crore will be borne by the respective State governments.
