SRINAGAR: A national tribal development campaign launched in October 2024 now lists 393 tribal villages in Jammu and Kashmir among the 63,843 villages covered across India, highlighting the Union Territory’s stake in a Rs 79,156 crore five-year drive to close infrastructure and service gaps in scheduled tribe habitations, government records show.
The Dharti Aaba Janjatiya Gram Utkarsh Abhiyan, known as DAJGUA, groups 25 interventions delivered through 17 central ministries to accelerate access to health, education, drinking water, housing, livelihoods and connectivity in scheduled tribe majority villages and aspirational districts. The Ministry of Tribal Affairs told Parliament that DAJGUA’s nationwide coverage spans 2,911 blocks in 549 districts and carries a central and state combined outlay of Rs 79,156 crore over five years.
In Jammu and Kashmir, the scheme’s data lists 20 districts and 112 blocks where tribal outreach is being pursued. The official table shows 91,072 scheduled tribe households in the Union Territory, with a scheduled tribe population of 502,935 out of a total population of 792,087 in the covered villages. Those figures underline the concentration of tribal communities in specific pockets and the potential scale of targeted interventions under DAJGUA.
The parliamentary reply also highlighted digital and AI initiatives under the tribal affairs ministry. The Adi-Vaani project, an artificial intelligence-enabled tribal language translator, has a beta version that supports four tribal languages and is intended to make policies and services available in tribal tongues — a measure that could strengthen access to entitlements in linguistically distinct pockets of Jammu and Kashmir if local languages or dialects are added in later phases.
