THE Adivasi Adhikar Rashtriya Manch (AARM), in a statement issued on February 3, has said that the union budget is unashamedly pro-corporate which bulldozes the rights of the working people of India. AARM strongly opposed its policy framework to privatise and sell India’s national assets including the public sector to corporates. In a situation where adivasis have suffered acutely during the pandemic – as migrant workers without work, as minor forest produce collectors denied decent prices, as students excluded from online classes, as casual and contract workers deprived of a minimum wage, as farmers denied Government benefits – the budget makes a mockery of their plight by callously low allocations.

The budget proposes land monetisation of surplus land held by PSUs and government undertakings, through a special purpose vehicle (SPV). This basically means that the previously cheaply acquired land from farmers under the draconian land acquisition act which was not utilised will now be sold off to corporate sector instead of being returned to the original owners or distributed to the landless. A lot of this land was under the customary occupation of adivasis, as cultivated land or as their habitat and community forest resource. This should be returned to the forest rights holders and adivasi communities and not sold off. Similarly, the monetisation of infrastructure is basically aimed at raising user charges and making public use of services more expensive. So TSP funds will be used to build high speed multi-lane highways through community resources, and the new guidelines from the environment ministry mean that linear projects will not need forest rights or environmental clearances. The last straw is that now adivasis will have to pay high user charges for the roads built with their money on their lands.

It was essential to expand public expenditure to meet the terrible problem of unemployment and to put money in the hands of the people to stimulate demand but instead, the budgetary allocations are stagnant at just Rs34 lakh crores, the same as the revised estimate for financial year 2020-2021. The AARM condemns the cuts in food subsidy by 43 per cent, in MGNREGA by 35 percent, in education by 6 per cent. This is a budget which will intensify the obscene inequalities in India further marginalising adivasis and other socially deprived communities.

Within this anti-people budget, under Statement-10B, the allocations and utilisations of the Scheduled Tribe Component (STC) of the budget are given. The government has made a misleading claim of an increase of Rs26, 000 crores in the STC over the last year, bringing the allocation to Rs79, 941 crores. Rs9, 000 crores of this increase is under the ministry of food and consumer affairs. This amount is most likely not for the adivasis, but to pay back the pending loans to the FCI. It is indeed shameful that instead of actually making increased allocations to ensure all adivasisare included in the Antodaya category, given their high levels of hunger and malnutrition, the government should use such statistical tricks to show an increase, where there is none. As much as Rs4, 000 crores has been included in the STC for the building of highways and main roads. These are general schemes with no specific benefit for adivasis, but have been wrongly included in the tribal budget calculations. Similarly there is a mysterious addition of Rs3, 600 crores as fertilizer subsidy to adivasis. Till date adivasis have not received such subsidies. There are many other such examples. Thus the STC figures are inflated in a fraudulent manner. Our demand has always been that STC (TSP) funds should be non-divertible and non-lapsable, with the clear objective of bridging the gap in socio-economic development of the STs. However, the budgetary allocations, especially in areas of high increase, are in easily non-transparent and divertible sectors.

The finance minister declared that 750 Ekalavya Model Residential Schools would be set up in adivasi populated areas. The unit cost of each school has been increased from Rs 20 crores to Rs 38 crores, and for hilly and difficult areas, it has been increased to Rs 48 crores. According to the current norm of an average of Rs38 crores per school, this would require an additional expenditure of Rs 22,500 crores. At present according to the MOTA website there are 588 schools of which 303 are non- functional. Buildings are complete in only 191 schools. Clearly this is for lack of funds. The increase in allocation in the budget is only Rs 100 crores (from Rs1,313 crores to Rs1,418 crores).Thus not only is the announcement of 750 new schools an empty promise, but the meager allocations will not help complete even the existing list.

In fact the issue is of low allocations and in some cases reduction in the allocations for the most important aspects of adivasi lives and livelihood. Shockingly the budget for adivasis from the department of school education and literacy has been reduced by Rs554 crores from Rs5, 841 crores to Rs5, 297 crores. In agriculture, the cut is Rs 979 crores. The government had promised MSP for minor forest produce; only Rs 155 crores has been allocated for this programme. In health, there has been a cut of Rs 337 crores for PMJAY and Ayushman Bharat. Presumably adivasi women have no right to benefits under the direct benefit programme for LPG since the allocation is cut by over Rs1,000 crores from Rs 1,631 crores to just Rs536 crores. These are just a few examples of budgetary cuts showing the anti-adivasi, anti-poor nature of this budget.

Adivasis in India have been criminally denied their rights in budgetary allocations. The STC guidelines issued in 2018 stated that the allocations should be “at least in proportion to their population” namely at least 8.6 per cent. This year it should have been Rs2, 99,558 crores. Instead the allocations, even accepting the highly inflated figure of Rs79, 941 crores, works out to only 2.3 per cent. The adivasis have been robbed of over Rs 2 lakh crores.

There is another aspect which requires investigation. The ministry of tribal affairs (MOTA) is the nodal agency for monitoring the STC. The website under STC monitoring shows that of the allocations under STC in the 2020-2021 budget, till February 1, 2021, only 48 percent of the allocation had been utilised. At a time when adivasis were in such suffering because of the pandemic and the lockdown, even the inadequate allocations were not utilised. But the budget figures do not reflect this. On the contrary, it shows full utilisation. This means that if this is to be realised, in the remaining three months of this financial year, 52 per cent of the STC which is un-utilised has to be spent. Is this possible?

The AARM calls upon its units to protest against this budget and the massive fraud on the adivasis, the poorest of the poor of India.