Aimed at raising the socio- economic status of tribal people, the southern Indian state of Kerala has developed a database of tribal families living in the state. The state government has already collected data of about five lakh tribal people from about 6000 tribal settlements spread across the state.
The SC/ST department took almost a year to complete the data collection. They used an android platform for this. A Trivandrum based start up company developed the android platform.
Noting that almost 95 per cent of the tribal population was covered, sources said that economically stable tribals were reluctant to cooperate with the survey in the fear of losing benefits.
The field workers who visited the hamlets recorded details with respect to their education, income, job and health among many things. The officials said that they would now be able to have a comprehensive data of all the tribal people in the state in a single platform. Accordingly, they would be able to develop many programmes for the upliftment of these people.
With the new platform and data collected, the government has all the details pertaining to each of the tribals.