ABSTRACT
Tribal communities, constituting about 15 per cent of the state’s population, bear a disproportionately high burden of poverty and multiple deprivation. While the phenomenon of significantly higher incidence of poverty among tribal as compared to non-tribal population is common to almost all the states in the country, tribal communities in Gujarat suffer a relatively higher degree of discrimination in terms of gap in the incidence of poverty among the two sets of communities.1 To a large extent, this reflects the growing inequality especially in the wake of the high economic growth experienced in the state since the mid-1990s. This aspect has been substantiated by the fact that the disparity in poverty between tribal and non-tribal populations increased during the latter half of the 1990s.
