World tribal day also known as the INTERNATIONAL DAY FOR WORLD’S INDIGENOUS PEOPLES is celebrated on 9th of August every year from 1994, the date marking the first meeting of the United Nations working group on Indigenous populations in Geneva in 1982.

As a continuation of 2019 being observed as the Year of Indigenous Languages, this year the World Tribal Day celebrations are focussed on preservation and documentation of tribal languages.

Each tribal language represents a unique view of life. They have to be preserved – not only for the present generation, but for posterity too !Thus various Linguistics departments in the South like University of Kerala, The Centre for Advanced Stufies Anmalai University as well as the Linguistics department of the Bharathiyar University Coimbatore have made efforts to collect, preserve and document these languages.

TRIBAL PANCHSHEEL :

India, at the time of Independence not only consisted of many small princely states but also a number of tribal villages and communities with their own unique cultural or ethnic practices and languages .These tribal societies have shown their strong resistance to invasions by Britishers into their lands and to alien interference into their lifestyle.

Thus sighting the need for a sensitive and most important job for the newly formed Independent Indian government to deal with these innocent souls without affecting their ethnic sanctity and motivate them to stay in Indian Union peacefully.Therefore the first Prime minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru formulated a policy to uphold the rights of tribal population and also to lay a way forward for their inclusion into the Indian administrative institutions and systems.And this policy is called as the Nehru’s Tribal Panchsheel , which includes five principles to be pursued vis-a-vis the tribals.They are:

1.People should develop along the lines of their own genius, and the imposition of alien values should be avoided.

2.Tribal rights in land and forest should be respected.

3.Teams of tribals should be trained in the work of administration and development.

4.Tribal areas should not be over-administered or overwhelmed with a multiplicity of schemes.

5.Results should be judged not by statistics or the amount of money spent, but by the human character that is evolved.

The celebration of World tribal day is of great importance as it emphasis on the empowerment and inclusion of the tribal people into the Global competitive world.The upliftment and documentation of tribal cultures holds priceless prominence in the study of human cultural evolution.