Since July, there have been two major protests in the country. The first, a Gen Z-led student agitation centred around Jantar Mantar, forced the resignation of Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan in July. The second is pushing for the removal of the Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. Between these two national moments, almost unnoticed, has been a tribal Gen Z-led uprising in Maharashtra. If the nationwide protests targeted the capture of democratic institutions, the tribal student-led protests highlighted how democracy is failing at multiple levels, seen and unseen, local and national, in ways that impact wide numbers or smaller groups.
It began in August near Pune, on a smaller note, then became a 17-day hunger strike before turning into a statewide agitation. It culminated on October 6, when tribal students walked nearly 190 km from Nashik to Mumbai. Before they could meet the Governor at Raj Bhavan and submit their memorandum of grievances, the students were bundled into private buses by the police and driven out of the city.
Maharashtra’s tribal Gen Z have called it their Ulgulan which means great tumult or upheaval. The word is originally from Mundari, the language of the Munda tribe. In 1899-1900, Birsa Munda, revered as Dharti Aaba, was all of 24 when he died in Ranchi Jail on June 9, 1900. His struggle against exploitation by British colonialists and local power brokers gave the word its historical weight. Birsa Munda’s Ulgulan was not a slogan. It was a political programme: Abua raj seter jana, maharani raj tundujana — end the Queen’s rule, establish our rule. It challenged the zamindari system, the dikus — outsiders, moneylenders, landlords — the bethbegari system of forced labour, and the colonial forest laws that severed tribals from jal, jungle and zameen.
The British crushed Birsa’s Ulgulan at Dombari Hill, but were forced to concede. Eight years after Birsa’s death, they enacted the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act, 1908, which prohibited the transfer of tribal land to non-tribals and recognised Mundari Khuntkattidar rights, that is the communal ownership of the original settlers.
The Maharashtra Ulgulan of 2026 pales before the battle of Birsa Munda. It is not demanding a kingdom, just asking for a chance to survive, On the night of August 9, at Japtalai village in Gadchiroli’s Dhanora taluka, six girls sleeping on the floor of their hostel — because there were no cots — were bitten by a common krait, one of the four most venomous snakes in India and a major cause of snake-bite deaths in the country. The krait is nocturnal and has potent neurotoxic venom that causes paralysis and respiratory failure. That night three of its victims died, three survived. They were in a room that houses 79 girls, in a hostel that has functioned like this for 25 years. The deaths exposed how a residential school or ashramshala constructed to carry tribal children to a better tomorrow had no cots to keep away snakes and scorpions or nets to prevent vectors or transport to take them to the closest medical help.
Gadchiroli is not an exception. In the last two years, 584 students have died in Maharashtra’s 1,013 ashram schools — 384 in government-run schools and 200 in aided ones. Official data released by the state’s Tribal Development Department lists snakebite, sickle-cell disease, illness, accidents, suicide as the cause of death. That is an average of nearly one death a day. Bhaskar Bhagare, MP from the Dindori Lok Sabha constituency has demanded a central inquiry into the deaths of the 584 tribal students. Maharashtra has the second largest tribal population in India, second after Madhya Pradesh. Although over 10 million in number, and accounting for more than nine per cent of the state’s total population, the tribal voice is not really heard.
For the last 12 years we have had a diagnostic report for the tribal conditions. In 2013, the Prime Minister’s Office constituted a high-level committee under Prof Virginius Xaxa, the noted sociologist and tribal studies scholar, to examine the socio-economic, health and educational status of scheduled tribes. The committee submitted its report in May 2014.The Xaxa Committee said what every tribal student knows: schools without water, electricity, toilets, boundary walls; teachers from outside who do not speak the children’s language; a curriculum that erases tribal history, art, music, dance; no health audit, no safety protocol. It recommended what should have been done immediately — multilingual instruction in early years, recruitment of local teachers and health workers, blending classroom teaching with tribal culture, folklore, history and knowledge systems, tribal health assemblies, and a legally enforceable safety and infrastructure audit for every residential school.
The committee recommended that the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare should redesign the primary and secondary health care services in Scheduled Areas and have a specially designed health plan that will not enforce a top-down national health programme but one that can ensure local participation. Its core warning was sharper: protective laws — PESA, FRA, and the principle of free prior informed consent of the gram sabha — were being “routinely manipulated and subverted.” The PESA Act and the Forest Rights Act are two key laws empowering tribals and forest dwellers by decentralising control over land, forests and local governance.
That subversion is visible in Gadchiroli, it is visible in Nashik, it is visible in tribal areas spanning 13 districts of the state. And in the private buses that were used to take tribal students out of Mumbai. What the state announced on October 7 — a hike in annual hostel and living allowances — does not even touch the fringe of their sordid conditions: poor sanitation, substandard infrastructure, severe malnutrition and unsafe surroundings, conditions that have claimed many lives and pushed tribal schooling to the ragged fringes of a marginalised education system.
Small adjustments and allowances from the government are not a way out of unclean drinking water, crumbling walls and a floor visited by snakes and scorpions. Birsa’s Ulgulan had big questions and demands that forced the British to change the land laws of Chotanagpur. Maharashtra’s Ulgulan is asking a far smaller question of the Indian State: Do our lives matter? The answer, so far, is no.
The Billion Press
(Lekha Rattanani is the managing editor of The Billion Press.)
