Pradhan Mantri Janjatiya Unnat Gram Abhiyan (PM-JUGA) – IMPRI Impact And Policy Research Institute

Policy Update
Paridhi Passi

Background

India’s tribal communities have long been among the most underserved sections of the population despite repeated policy attention. According to the 2011 Census, Scheduled Tribes (STs) make up 8.6% of India’s population, over 10.42 crore people from more than 705 distinct communities, with most living in remote forests, hills, and interior areas where roads are sparse and services are difficult to access.

This persistent gap, however, stems not from an absence of programmes but from their consistent failure to work in coordination. Initiatives like the Tribal Sub-Plan (TSP) and the Development Action Plan for Scheduled Tribes (DAPST) had reasonable intent but fell short in delivery. A family could get a house sanctioned under PMAY and wait years for electricity because that came under a different department. An Ayushman card would be issued but the nearest hospital remained unreachable due to the lack of a road. Each scheme ran in its own lane, and the gaps between lanes were where tribal households got lost.

PM-JUGA was designed specifically to fix this. Announced in the Union Budget 2024–25 and approved by the Union Cabinet in September 2024, the Pradhan Mantri Janjatiya Unnat Gram Abhiyan was launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on 2nd October 2024 at Hazaribagh, Jharkhand, under the name Dharti Aaba Janjatiya Gram Utkarsh Abhiyan. “Dharti Aaba”, Father of the Earth, is a title associated with tribal freedom fighter Birsa Munda, and naming the scheme after him is a deliberate acknowledgement of tribal history and identity. The scheme is administered by the Ministry of Tribal Affairs in coordination with 17 line ministries and is widely regarded as the most ambitious tribal development initiative since Independence.

Figure 1: PM-JUGA awareness poster released by the Government of India following the scheme’s announcement under Union Budget 2024–25. 

Source: Press Information Bureau (PIB), Government of India.

Table 1: PM-JUGA — Key Facts

Objectives

The central idea behind PM-JUGA is saturation, not just reaching a village but ensuring every eligible household within it receives what it is entitled to under existing Central schemes. The scheme’s key objectives are:

• Addressing gaps in housing, drinking water, electricity, roads, and digital connectivity at the village level
• Reducing tribal IMR and MMR to national average levels over the five-year period
• Recognising the forest rights of 22 lakh FRA patta holders and connecting them to livelihood support
• Improving the Gross Enrolment Ratio of tribal students to match national levels through better education infrastructure

Functioning

One of the more practical aspects of PM-JUGA is that it does not try to build a new delivery system from scratch. Instead, it works by bringing existing schemes, PMAY-G, Jal Jeevan Mission, PMGSY, Ayushman Bharat, BharatNet, PM Ujjwala Yojana and others, together and directing them towards the same villages at the same time. Each of the 17 ministries handles its own component through funds allocated under DAPST over five years. All progress is tracked through the PM Gati Shakti platform using geo-tagged field data.

The scheme covers villages with 500 or more residents where at least 50% are ST, and villages in Aspirational Districts with at least 50 tribal inhabitants. What distinguishes it from earlier efforts is the saturation insistence, the requirement that every eligible household is covered, not a target percentage of them.

Table 2: Key Interventions and Targets under PM-JUGA

Performance

Since PM-JUGA was only launched in October 2024, it is still early to make a quantifiable assessment of its execution and outcomes entirely. That said, progress across several components has been visible in the first year. As of July 2025, the scheme has reached over 5 crore tribal citizens across target villages. Construction of 20 lakh pucca houses under PMAY-G is underway, and water supply has been extended to eligible households including 5,000 remote hamlets with fewer than 20 tribal inhabitants, a category that past programmes rarely reached. Under PM Matsya Sampada Yojana, 10,000 tribal groups and 1 lakh individuals have received livelihood support for fish culture.

A useful ground-level example comes from a Chenchu and Koya tribal hamlet in Andhra Pradesh, where a women-led Village Water and Sanitation Committee formed under PM-JUGA secured tap water connections for all 64 households. The committee model has since been taken up by neighbouring villages, which suggests the scheme is capable of creating local institutions alongside physical infrastructure when implementation is done carefully. The Ministry of Tribal Affairs budget growing from ₹4,296 crore in 2013–14 to over ₹13,000 crore in 2025–26, a rise of over 200%, indicates that the institutional resources behind PM-JUGA are more substantial than most earlier initiatives.

Emerging Issues

The scale and ambition of PM-JUGA are hard to dispute, but several problems in the scheme’s design and early implementation deserve attention.

The most significant is the coordination challenge. Having 17 ministries involved means that each component, roads, water, health units, electricity, runs on its own timeline and budget cycle. When one ministry’s component is delayed, it affects the usefulness of what other ministries have already delivered. A health unit with no connecting road is an incomplete intervention. At present there is no single-window system for tribal families to raise complaints or track what is pending across departments, which leaves communities with the difficult task of navigating multiple bureaucratic channels on their own.

Some further issues that stand out are:

• FRA (Forest Rights Act) lag: The forest rights component is one of the most important parts of PM-JUGA but depends on state governments completing recognition of individual and community claims, something many states have moved very slowly on for years, and PM-JUGA has not visibly changed that pace yet.
• Quality pressures: With 25 interventions and a five-year window, there is a risk of speed being prioritised over quality. Past large-scale rural programmes have shown a pattern of targets being met numerically while outcomes on the ground remain weak.

Suggestions

• A village-level dashboard accessible to Gram Sabhas should be set up so communities can track progress directly and raise complaints without depending entirely on ministerial data.
• Joint titling of homes for women should be made a standard condition under the PMAY-G component of PM-JUGA, as is already the case in several state-level implementations.
• Block-level legal aid and extended grievance windows should be provided for FRA recognition, since the process is too documentation-heavy for most forest-dwelling families to navigate without support.

Way Forward

PM-JUGA addresses the right problem. Tribal development in India has not suffered from a lack of schemes so much as a lack of coordinated, complete delivery of the schemes that already exist. The convergence model, the ₹79,156 crore outlay, and the five-year framework together represent a more serious attempt to change this than what has come before.

Whether that translates into outcomes depends on implementation, whether PVTGs and forest-dwelling households are actually counted in saturation exercises, whether states move faster on FRA, whether monitoring data is honest, and whether women end up with assets in their names. The Andhra Pradesh example is encouraging because it shows what careful implementation can produce, not just a tap but a functional local institution. Obtaining that kind of implementation quality consistently across 63,000 villages is the real test PM-JUGA now faces.

Ultimately, PM-JUGA’s legacy will be determined not by the scale of its outlay or the number of schemes it converges, but by whether tribal communities experience a tangible and lasting improvement in their daily lives. For that to happen, saturation must mean genuine coverage rather than administrative checkbox completion, and the voices of Gram Sabhas must shape implementation on the ground rather than merely endorse it on paper. 

References

Press Information Bureau, Ministry of Tribal Affairs, GoI. (2024, September). Cabinet Approval of PM-JUGA. https://pib.gov.in

Press Information Bureau. (2025, July 22). India’s Largest Tribal Village Development Scheme. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressNoteDetails.aspx?NoteId=154915&ModuleId=3

Press Information Bureau. (2025). Schemes for Tribal Areas. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2158295

News on AIR, Government of India. (2024, October 1). PM Modi to launch PM Janjatiya Unnat Gram Abhiyan in Hazaribagh. https://www.newsonair.gov.in/pm-modi-to-launch-%e2%82%b979156-crore-pradhan-mantri-janjatiya-unnat-gram-abhiyan-in-hazaribagh 

About the Contributor

Paridhi Passi is a Research and Editorial Intern at IMPRI and a Political Science (Hons.) student at Daulat Ram College, University of Delhi. Her academic interests lie in public policy and governance.

Acknowledgement

The author extends sincere thanks to the IMPRI team for their guidance.

Disclaimer: All views expressed in the article belong solely to the author and not necessarily to the organization.

Reviewer’s name: Vyomini Nathwani & Ameya Satam

Disclaimer 

All views expressed in the article belong solely to the author and not necessarily to the organisation.

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