By The New Indian Express 11th June 2013 07:18 AM
India is known to live in many centuries. Not only is it multi-lingual with 18 official languages; multi-religious, being the birthplace of four religions — Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism and Jainism — and multicultural, it is also the home of nuclear scientists, who belong to the 21st century, and pastoral nomads of the medieval and earlier periods. While some of them subsist as hunter-gatherers of the prehistoric times, other have entered the modern age as salt traders, fortune tellers, conjurers, acrobats, medicinal quacks and snake charmers.
Anthropologists have identified about 500 nomadic groups in India, numbering about 80 million or seven per cent of the population. They were once part of the mainstream since the country itself, or at least substantial parts of it outside the major towns, were not so advanced as now. But, the gap between the wandering tribes and the rest of the population began to widen when the colonial administration began to see them as outcasts.
These prejudices have not died out. A rapidly modernising India has little time for these relics of the past who have remained untouched by “civilisation”. Since the nomads themselves are riven by caste, language and region, politicians tend to ignore them. Unlike other downtrodden groups, they haven’t benefitted from social welfare schemes. To the few who have taken up their cause, much time is spent in offering a roof over their heads so that they can at least have an address, which will entitle them to social benefits and send their children to school. It is time the government intervened to give them a sense of identity, which is their due as citizens. The UIDAI, mandated to allot a unique identification number linked to a resident’s demographic and biometric information, should take up the case of the nomadic and denotified tribes and provide them with Aadhaar cards.