Development-Induced Displacement Among Tribals: Magnitude and Impact

Every big dam, mine, or factory that gets built in India has a human cost that rarely makes it into the ribbon-cutting speech. Millions of people, most of them from tribal communities, have had to leave their homes, fields, and forests to make way for projects meant to power someone else’s growth. This is displacement, and understanding its scale is the first step to understanding why it remains one of the most persistent tribal problems in the country.

What counts as displacement 🔗

Displacement means being forced to leave your native land, home, or habitat. It can happen for very different reasons. War and persecution push people out. Natural disasters like floods, earthquakes, or cyclones do the same. And then there is a third, entirely man-made kind: development-induced displacement, where projects such as dams, mines, factories, and highways force people off their land and away from the resources they depend on.

Unlike a flood or a conflict, development-induced displacement is planned. Someone decides, on paper, that a dam will submerge a valley or that a mine will need a hillside. The people who actually live there usually find out only when the surveyors arrive.

Why this kind of displacement is forced, not chosen 🔗

Development-induced displacement is involuntary. The state, acting through its public authorities, uses its power of eminent domain to acquire land, and the people affected have little real say in the matter. This is why the people who study displacement use specific labels for those who are pushed out: project displaced persons (PDPs), project-affected persons (PAPs), oustees, or evictees. Each term reflects the same underlying reality, that individuals and entire communities are uprooted from their homelands for someone else’s idea of economic progress, frequently without meaningful consultation or consent.

This absence of consent matters enormously for tribal communities, whose relationship with land is not just economic. Land, forest, and river are tied to identity, religion, and collective memory. When that connection is severed by a government order, the loss cannot be measured only in rupees.

Why tribal communities bear the brunt 🔗

Here is the uncomfortable pattern that shows up in almost every study of displacement in India: tribal communities are displaced far more than their share of the population would suggest. Scheduled Tribes make up roughly 8.6 percent of India’s population, yet they account for a disproportionately large share, often estimated at 40 percent or more, of all people displaced by development projects historically.

The reason is straightforward. Tribal regions in central and eastern India sit on some of the richest reserves of minerals, forests, and river systems in the country. When the state looks for land to build a dam or open a mine, these resource-rich, sparsely urbanised tribal belts are the first places it turns to. A detailed analysis of Indian development projects found that tribal households have historically made up more than half the population displaced by major dam and mining projects in states like Odisha and Jharkhand, even though these communities had the least role in planning those projects and often the least share in their benefits.

The scale, project by project 🔗

Numbers from individual projects make the pattern concrete. Four large dam projects, spread across four different states and four different decades, tell a strikingly similar story.

Polavaram, Andhra Pradesh 🔗

The Polavaram irrigation project on the Godavari river is now recognised as the single largest displacement caused by any irrigation project in the country. Government estimates put the affected area at close to 94,000 acres of land across roughly 276 villages in the Scheduled Areas of Andhra Pradesh, with well over two lakh people facing displacement, more than half of them tribal residents belonging to communities such as the Koya, Konda Reddy, and Konda Kamari. A 2025 tracking report on the project notes that the number of affected villages has since crept even higher than original estimates, as unplanned flooding submerged settlements that were not part of the original resettlement calculations.

On the ground, the process has been especially hard on tribal families. Reporting from resettlement colonies describes families who depended on forest produce such as bamboo, honey, and tamarind now living in colonies with no access to forest land at all, their traditional occupations effectively ended overnight. Even by late 2024, official data on the project showed tens of thousands of families still awaiting full resettlement years after their villages were marked for submergence.

Upper Indravati, Odisha 🔗

The Upper Indravati hydroelectric project in Odisha displaced around 18,500 people, and roughly nine out of ten of them were tribal residents of the Koraput region, one of the most heavily forested and tribal-dominated parts of the state. A Ministry of Tribal Affairs study on hydel project resettlement tracked how displacement here unfolded over nearly a decade, from 1989 to 1997, with land compensation rates that many families later argued failed to reflect the true value of what they had lost.

Koel Karo, Jharkhand 🔗

The proposed Koel Karo dam project, spanning what was then southern Bihar and is now Jharkhand, was expected to displace around 66,000 people. Estimates suggest roughly 88 percent of them were tribal, drawn largely from Munda and Oraon communities whose opposition to the project eventually became one of the longest-running anti-displacement movements in Indian history.

Sardar Sarovar, Gujarat 🔗

The Sardar Sarovar dam on the Narmada river displaced around 200,000 people across Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, and Maharashtra, with tribal families making up close to 58 percent of those affected. The project became the centre of the Narmada Bachao Andolan, a movement that pushed rehabilitation and resettlement onto the national policy agenda in a way few earlier projects had managed to do.

What displacement actually costs tribal families 🔗

The headline numbers only tell part of the story. Losing land is rarely just about losing an asset. For a tribal household, it usually means losing access to forest produce that supplemented food and income, losing grazing land for livestock, and losing the social and religious structures tied to a specific patch of earth, a sacred grove, a burial ground, a river.

Resettlement colonies frequently fail to replace what was lost. Recent reporting on Polavaram-affected families found that many resettlement sites lack basic amenities such as drinking water and were not even granted official village or Gram Panchayat status years after people moved in, leaving residents without proper access to civic services or local self-governance. This is a recurring theme across resettlement projects: physical relocation happens first, and administrative and social integration, if it happens at all, comes years later.

There is also an economic dimension that is easy to overlook. Compensation is typically calculated on land value, but tribal livelihoods often rest on forest access rights and common property resources that have no formal market price and are therefore rarely compensated fairly, or at all.

Can policy fix this 🔗

India’s main legal response to these problems is the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013, usually shortened to the RFCTLARR Act. It replaced the colonial-era Land Acquisition Act of 1894 and, for the first time, made rehabilitation and resettlement a legal requirement rather than a discretionary add-on. The law includes specific safeguards for Scheduled Tribes, including provisions that treat any unauthorised transfer of tribal land as void, and rules that require a share of compensation to be paid before land is even taken over.

In practice, gaps remain. Social impact assessments are often criticised as superficial, Gram Sabha consultations are sometimes reduced to a formality, and implementation varies sharply from state to state. The law improved the framework on paper, but as projects like Polavaram show, the distance between legal protection and lived experience for displaced tribal families is still considerable.

What do you think? 🔗

What do you think? Given how concentrated the resource wealth of India is in tribal regions, is there a way to plan development projects that does not repeatedly place the heaviest burden on the same communities? And when compensation is based only on land price, what would a fairer measure of loss look like for families whose lives are built around forests and rivers rather than markets?

References

1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-024-03166-3
2. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s43545-026-01385-w
3. https://www.landconflictwatch.org/conflicts/polavaram-dam-in-andhra-pradesh
4. https://www.downtoearth.org.in/governance/polavaram-displaced-and-nowhere-to-go-tribal-families-robbed-of-rights-livelihood-in-resettlement-colonies-80604
5. https://repository.tribal.gov.in/bitstream/123456789/75111/1/SCST_2020_research_0429.pdf
6. https://indiankanoon.org/doc/110685803/