Budget 2024: Centre to launch PM Janjatiya Unnat Gram Abhiyaan for tribal welfare

Finance Minister announces PM - Janjatiya Unnat Gram Abhiyaan for Scheduled Tribes, with increased budget for tribal welfare schemes.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on July 23 announced that the Union government will launch the PM - Janjatiya Unnat Gram Abhiyaan with an aim at achieving full saturation of basic facilities among five crore Scheduled Tribe families across 63,000 villages in tribal-majority areas and aspirational districts.

The scheme, designed after the PM-JANMAN to achieve saturation of basic facilities for Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups, will be for Scheduled Tribe populations across the country, the Finance Minister said in her Budget (2024-25) speech on July 23, without going into the details for how much funds are being set aside for this or how this package would be implemented or overseen.

Tribal Affairs Minister Jual Oram hailed the announcement of the “transformative scheme”, expressing gratitude, adding in a social media post that it would “uplift the socio-economic conditions of tribal communities”.

Top officials of the Ministry of Tribal Affairs have not yet responded to questions about how this new package would work.

This came as the government allocated ₹13,000 crore in the Budget Estimate (24-25) for the Ministry of Tribal Affairs, which showed an increase of 4.31% compared to BE 23-24 even as the Revised Estimate for FY 23-24 had been pegged at ₹7,605 crore.

The last available Actual Expenditure for the FY 2022-23 showed that the Ministry had spent a total of ₹7,273.53 crore.

More than half of the Tribal Affairs Ministry’s allocation in this year’s Budget Estimates (24-25) - ₹6,399 crore - has gone to the scheme for Eklavya Model Residential Schools for tribal students. Ministry sources explained that this increase was largely owing to the management of the schools being brought under the Centre from 2023-24 onwards.