Evaluate the adequacy of legal protections for Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups in the context of large infrastructure projects.

India's 75 Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTGs)—such as the ~200 Shompen of Great Nicobar—are its most fragile citizens. A lattice of laws shields them, yet mega-projects like the ~₹72,000-crore Great Nicobar Project [3] test whether these protections are substantive or merely notional.

A robust framework on paper

• Habitat and consent rights: The Forest Rights Act, 2006 grants PVTGs special habitat rights over customary forests and mandates written Gram Sabha consent before any forest diversion [2].
• Special safeguards: Group-specific instruments—the A&N Protection of Aboriginal Tribes Regulation, 1956, presidential regulation-making under Article 240, and the Shompen Policy, 2015—prioritise welfare and bar displacement [1].
• Project-level guarantees: For Great Nicobar, MoEFCC mandated an independent monitoring committee and a net increase in tribal reserve area (76.98 sq km re-notified against 73.07 sq km de-notified) [1].

Gaps exposed by large projects

• Territorial dilution: De-notification of tribal reserves to enable clearances erodes the very land-based protection the law promises.
• Attenuated consent: Obtaining genuine free, prior and informed consent from isolated hunter-gatherers is procedurally near-impossible, reducing FRA safeguards to formality.
• Strategic-zone exemptions and advisory-only bodies (NCST, monitoring committees) leave enforcement weak, while EIAs lean on proponent-funded studies.

The protections are comprehensive in design but their adequacy falters at implementation. Making consent binding, monitoring genuinely independent, and clearances ecology-sensitive—aligned with SDG-10 and SDG-16—can reconcile strategic imperatives with tribal survival.