Write an account on Development Action Plan for Scheduled Tribes (DAPST). (Answer in 250 words)

- Write an account on Development Action Plan for Scheduled Tribes (DAPST). (Answer in 250 words)
Introduction
The Development Action Plan for Scheduled Tribes is not a scheme but a budgeting device: it earmarks a share of every relevant ministry's funds for tribal development and makes it visible in the Union Budget.

Body
1. What it is and how the earmarking works: it replaced the Tribal Sub-Plan, which had run since 1974-75, when plan and non-plan budgeting was abandoned in 2017-18. Ministries set aside a proportion of their scheme allocations broadly matching the Scheduled Tribe share of the population, and the total appears as a separate statement in the Budget. Some forty ministries now report under it, and the annual total runs well above a lakh crore rupees, an order of magnitude rather than a precise figure.
2. How it operates: the Ministry of Tribal Affairs is nodal and monitors expenditure through a dedicated portal, but the money is spent by line ministries on their own schemes. At state level the tribal component is run by the tribal welfare department through integrated tribal development agencies, with Article 275(1) grants as a separate window.
3. What it funds: Eklavya schools and scholarships, health, drinking water, roads, minor forest produce support and livelihoods, and it is now the funding base on which PM-JANMAN and the Dharti Aaba village programme sit.
4. The problems: allocation is often notional, a highway through a tribal district booked as tribal expenditure; under-spending and year-end rushes are routine; the proportional formula ignores the higher cost of serving dispersed hill populations; and there is no outcome measurement and no central statutory backing.

Conclusion
Its achievement is a traceable budget line where none existed. Its weakness is that visibility of spending has never been converted into accountability for results.