Can a community shape its future when the big decisions about its land, forests and knowledge are made somewhere else? This question sits at the centre of tribal self-determination in India's Scheduled Areas. The Constitution and special laws recognise distinct rights and institutions, yet land alienation, displacement, administrative centralisation and the neglect of customary knowledge keep testing them.
The question is not only whether the state delivers welfare or holds consultations. It is whether communities have real, accountable and legally protected authority over decisions that shape their collective life. Scholars such as Virginius Xaxa have long argued that Adivasi claims are claims of indigeneity and equal citizenship, not pleas from the backward. B. D. Sharma, widely credited as an architect of the Panchayats (Extension to the Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996 (PESA), called the Fifth Schedule a "Constitution within a Constitution", meant to create a distinct framework of protection and community authority, not a mere administrative exception. His later account described the gap between that promise and state practice as a history of broken promises.
I propose a simple idea to test this gap: custodial autonomy. It means a community's capacity to govern its relationship with land, resources, knowledge and institutions, while safeguarding the conditions of life for future generations. It does not mean freezing culture, opposing development or placing community decisions beyond legal scrutiny. It asks who defines development, who bears its costs and who enjoys its benefits.
Consider land. Systems that recognise visible cultivation or formal title more readily than shifting cultivation, forest gathering, customary boundaries or sacred sites make other forms of use look unproductive or invisible. Karl Polanyi called land a "fictitious commodity", never produced for sale. For many Adivasi communities, land is livelihood, memory, ecology and meaning all at once. Amita Baviskar's work in the Narmada valley and the study of the Niyamgiri hills by Felix Padel and Samarendra Das show what happens when projects justified by national interest override these relationships. Protecting land therefore takes more than banning transfers. It needs secure tenure, viable livelihoods, access to forest produce and a real voice in decisions about acquisition, extraction and rehabilitation.
The political philosopher Philip Pettit offers a useful test: a person or community is unfree when someone else holds an uncontrolled power to interfere arbitrarily, even if that power is not used every day. Imagine a Gram Sabha resolution that is honoured only when an official chooses to honour it. The harm is not just an unwelcome outcome. It is the community's dependence on someone's goodwill. The remedy is practical: clear legal powers, public records of resolutions, written reasons whenever an authority departs from a resolution, accessible review and accountability for non-compliance.
Respect must also be material. Recognition without control over land, budgets and priorities is hollow, a point Nancy Fraser has pressed. Indigenous thinkers such as Glen Coulthard go further, arguing that rights granted by the state can leave the underlying structure of power untouched. Their work comes from settler-colonial settings, and India's Adivasis hold constitutional status under the Fifth and Sixth Schedules, PESA and the Forest Rights Act. Even so, the challenge carries over: are rights gifts of the state, or the exercise of a community's own responsibilities to land and to those yet to be born?
Knowledge matters too. Miranda Fricker's idea of epistemic injustice describes how some people's testimony is unfairly discounted. In Scheduled Areas this shows up when revenue records are treated as conclusive while oral histories, customary boundaries and ecological knowledge are brushed aside. This does not mean customary claims should escape scrutiny. It means fair procedures must be able to receive and weigh different kinds of evidence instead of disqualifying them in advance.
We should be honest that threats do not come only from outside. Alpa Shah's study of Jharkhand shows that Adivasi villages are internally stratified, and that educated, connected intermediaries shape how rights and schemes reach people. Xaxa warned against treating tribal society as uniform. Elite capture, the exclusion of women and the silencing of dissent are real risks. These are reasons to build inclusive procedures and protect individual rights, not reasons to dismiss self-government. Nor should they become a way of blaming communities for dispossession that is structural. Outside exclusion and inside inequality feed each other, since scarcity forces distress sales, and unequal access to information concentrates influence.
So custodial autonomy rests on four linked conditions. Community institutions must be able to exercise the powers the law gives them, with timely information, open deliberation and proper records. They must be protected from arbitrary override through clear rules, reviewable decisions and remedies. They need material and knowledge capacity: secure rights, livelihoods and procedures that respect customary and ecological knowledge. And they must be accountable across generations and within the community, without letting present leaders silence women, poorer households or the young. Remove any one and the rest weaken. Decision-making without resources is symbolic, and community authority without internal accountability can reproduce domination.
The law already holds important elements of this authority, but it must be described precisely. Section 4(i) of PESA requires consultation with the Gram Sabha or appropriate Panchayat before land is acquired for development projects and before affected people are resettled. Sections 4(k) and 4(l) give the Gram Sabha a mandatory recommendation role for minor mineral licences, leases and auctions. None of this is a universal veto over every project, and it should not be sold as one. In Samatha v. State of Andhra Pradesh (1997), the Supreme Court struck down mining leases granted to non-tribal private parties in Scheduled Areas under the state's land transfer regulation. In the Niyamgiri case (2013), it directed Gram Sabhas to decide forest-rights claims, including cultural and religious ones, before the forest-clearance decision was taken. These rulings matter, but their reach depends on the statute and the facts.
The larger problem is implementation. The Xaxa Committee in 2014 found wide gaps between legal entitlements and their realisation. Closing them is not mysterious. Gram Sabha resolutions should be recorded and public. Officials should state the legal basis and reasons for decisions affecting community rights. Review and remedy should be workable. Village plans should reflect community priorities, not just externally fixed targets. Forest-rights recognition should be tied to livelihoods through minor forest produce, horticulture and local enterprises. Legal literacy, paralegal help and access to records should be widely available. Where communities wish to document customary knowledge, they should lead the process, and sacred knowledge must never be exposed without consent.
The test of development is not the number of schemes delivered or projects completed. It is whether Adivasi communities take part as decision-makers in what happens to their land, their knowledge and their future. Moving from consultation to custodianship is how India begins to keep the promise made in the Fifth Schedule.
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*Contact: pallatrinadh5@gmail.com
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