Write an account on the contribution of Verrier Elwin in developing policies for the tribal populations in post-independent India. (Answer in 350 words)

- Write an account on the contribution of Verrier Elwin in developing policies for the tribal populations in post-independent India. (Answer in 350 words)
Introduction
Verrier Elwin is the only anthropologist whose views became the declared tribal policy of independent India. His importance lies in the fact that he changed his mind, and that the changed position was adopted.

Body
1. The earlier position: in The Baiga (1939) and Loss of Nerve, Elwin proposed a national park in which tribes would be sheltered from the moneylender, the liquor contractor, the missionary and the outsider until they could meet them on equal terms. Ghurye's reply of 1943 called the tribes backward Hindus and isolation a colonial device, and the isolation-versus-assimilation controversy shaped Indian tribal policy for a generation.
2. The revised position: Elwin abandoned the park, took Indian citizenship in 1954, and in A Philosophy for NEFA (1957) argued for integration on tribal terms. The five principles which he expounded and Nehru endorsed became the tribal panchsheel — develop along the lines of their own genius, respect rights in land and forest, administer through their own people, avoid over-administration, and judge by the quality of human character rather than by statistics.
3. How it entered administration: as Adviser for Tribal Affairs to the North-East Frontier Agency from 1954 he shaped the Indian Frontier Administrative Service, requiring officers trained in anthropology and in local languages; instruction in the mother tongue; village councils as the base of administration; and the deliberate encouragement of crafts, dance and the dormitory. His books on the myths and history of the frontier were written for administrators as much as for scholars.
4. Criticism and assessment: the human zoo charge persists, as does the claim that the policy retarded education and integration in the North-East. Against it stand Arunachal's surviving languages, its land rights and its comparative freedom from insurgency, and the long afterlife of his principles in PESA and the Forest Rights Act.

Conclusion
Ramachandra Guha's reassessment is fair: Elwin was a romantic who became a realist. The panchsheel remains the only coherent statement of principle Indian tribal policy has ever had.