Encyclopedia of Tribes in Odisha: The Chief Minister of Odisha Navin Patnaik recently unveiled the “Encyclopedia of Tribes in Odisha”.

• With this, Odisha has become the first state to publish an encyclopedia based on tribal communities.

About the encyclopedia:

• The encyclopedia documents the unique and old-age traditions and culture of Odisha.
• The encyclopedia has been published by the Schedule Castes and Scheduled Tribes Research and Training Institute (SCSTRTI) and Odisha State Tribal Museum.
• The encyclopedia is of 3800 papers contributed by its own research personnel.
• The available articles are by several research scholars and eminent anthropologists on distinct aspects of the tribes.
• It consists of five edited volumes.
• It has 418 research articles on the tribals, including 13 particularly vulnerable groups.

Significance:

• A documented cultural identity of the tribes is necessary because the ancient cultures and ways of life of the tribes are undergoing frequent and significant changes.
• The main goal of publishing an encyclopedia is to appraise the old and new, the past and the present cultural description of the tribal community.
• Therefore, publishing an encyclopedia is an endeavour to gather and present published and unpublished data about their ethnography and development.
• It is a fine repository of ethnographic knowledge and an excellent exposition of unaltered, specific, and varied tribal cultures.

Odisha Tribal Community:

• Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh have bigger numbers as a proportion of the total population than Odisha.
• but Odisha has the most diverse tribal communities in the country.
• Tribes constitute 22.85% of the population in Odisha.
• A total number of 62 tribal communities live in the state.

Background:

• A tribal atlas depicting the distributional characteristics of Odisha's tribal population, the ecological context of the tribal habitat, and socio-cultural characteristics such as linguistic or dialectal affinity, sex composition, and literary levels was published by the state government of Odisha.
• It contained 60 plates of maps with subjective graphs and diagrams.