Social Sanction and its Function in Tribal Societies

There are 67.8 million Scheduled Tribes people in India, constituting 8.74 % of India’s total population (Census 2001). Scheduled Tribes are those which are notified as such by the President o f India under Article 342 o f the Constitution. The tribals in India can be divided into two categories: (i) frontier tribes, and (ii) non-frontier" tribes. The former are inhabitants of the North-East frontier states with 12.02% of India’s Scheduled Tribes population at the borders of Burma, China, Tibet and Bangladesh. They occupy a special position in the sphere o f national politics. Different tribal groups together in the states of Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Mizoram, and Nagaland form 64.22, 85.94, 94.46 and 89.15 percent of the state population respectively (Census 2001). Similarly, in Assam, Manipur and Tripura they form 12.41, 39.96 and 31.05 percent of the state population respectively (Ibid.). The rest o f the 87.98% n on-frontier tribes are distributed in most o f the mainland states, though they are concentrated in large numbers in Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Rajasthan and Himachal Pradesh. Their population ranges from 4.00 to 32.00 percent in these states (Census 2001