The workshop will bring together academics, grassroots workers and activists to share their concerns and create a dialogue regarding health development work in history and in the current political climate in tribal India.

Since the late nineteenth century, many different groups have sought to provide health care for the tribal peoples of India, ranging from the British colonial rulers, Christian missionaries, nationalist activists, the postcolonial Indian state, private doctors, NGO workers, religious organisations, evangelistic faith healers, and political and quasi-political groups. Despite all this attention, health care in such areas is at best patchy, and generally highly inadequate. Conference papers will examine both this history and provide a contemporary survey of this process in the context of the tribal areas of India. As the distinction between those classed by the state as ‘scheduled tribes’ (ST) and other poor rural communities is sometimes blurred in practice, papers will also be welcome on other such groups whose predicament is comparable.