An overview of the socio-economic and demographic transition among the Santal: a census analysis.

Abstract

The Santals are described as the largest most integrated and possibly the most resilient tribe in eastern India. "The paper aims at looking into the parameters that set Santals in the process of socio-economic and demographic transformation and subsequently search for, the plausible explanation for the underlying mechanism for such changes.... The paper discusses the growth of their population and finds that Santals are growing below national average with increase in concentration in some of the pockets in Bihar and West Bengal, while it is spreading towards evenness in Orissa. In the absence of 1991 census data on the tribe wise breakdown the analysis has been restricted to the 1961, 1971 and 1981 census returns and availability of the literature on the tribe."