Verrier Elwin, who lived nearly all his life among the tribal people in central and north-eastern India and who had one of the formative influences in the evolution of the new government’s policies towards the tribes, was refered the fate of the tribal people under British rule as follows: they suffered oppression and exploitation, because there soon came merchants and liquor-venders, cajoling, tricking, swindling them in their ignorance and simplicity until bit by bit their broad acres dwindled and they sank into the poverty in which many of them still live today. Simultaneously, missionaries were destroying their art, their dances, their weaving and their whole culture.

1. Colonialism also transformed the tribals relationship with the forest. They depended on the forest for food, fuel and cattle feed and raw materials for their handicrafts. In many parts of India the hunger for land by the immigrant peasants from the plains led to the destruction of forests, depriving the tribals of their traditional means of livelihood. To conserve forests and to facilitate their commercial exploitation, the colonial authorities brought large tracts of forest lands under forests laws which forbade shifting cultivation and put severe restrictions on the tribal’s use of the forest and their access to forest products.
2. Network railways and road way extended to tribal areas because tribal areas were resources rich areas. So to exploit these resources like forests, mines; britishers broke their isolation. Along with britishers, there come band of moneylenders and plantation formers. These outsides had different economic motives and way of life. They had no sensitivity to tribal culture and ecology.
3. Loss of land, indebtedness, exploitation by middlemen, denial of access of forests and forest products, and oppression and extortion by policemen, forest officials and other government officials was to lead to a series of tribal uprisings in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for example the Santhal uprising and the Munda rebellion led by Birsa Munda and the participation of the tribal people in the national and peasant movements in Orissa, Bihar, West Bengal Andhra, Maharashtra and Gujarat. Following the various rebellions in tribal areas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the colonial government set up ‘excluded’ and ‘partially excluded’ areas, where the entry of non-tribals was prohibited or regulated. In these areas, the British favoured indirect rule through local kings or headmen.

The colonial system, where, followed strengthening the feudal crust of tribal .societies, formed by chiefs and zamindars and simultaneous- unlike Africa indirect part Indian Resident kept tribal states situated regions. That the normal laws should automatically apply to the tribal areas was the principle passage of the Scheduled Districts Act (1874) and shaped the concept of the backward areas in the Government of India Act of 1919. Whether or not this principle should continue to applied was a matter that figured in a most lively debate in the early 1930s. While one school contended that aborigines formed in India and should be placed charge of the British government, the nationalists saw in this proposition the continuation all the imperial policy of divide and rule.

However, the tribal and non-tribal areas were both partly and fully ''excluded'' in the Government of India Act of 1935. Gandhi reacted sharply to the segregation of various communities, clearly the tribal, under the dangerous spell of the policy of the ''isolation and status quo''. The Act would recall, separated the rest of the inhabitants. The ''Excluded Areas'' were placed under governments direct the Adivasi were put into watertight compartments and classified as tribal people by the government. While including Welfare as the fourteenth Mahatma said: Adivasi have become tenth item in the construction program. But they are not the least in point of importance.

The tendency on primitives whose the need '' provide adequate safeguards for the tribal was again extensively discussed in the Assembly, and the nationalist opinion favored incorporation of far radical provisions for the of the tribal’s'' interests in the forms of the V and VI Indian Constitution.