Van Dhan conclave spotlights tribal forest-produce push

The Ministry of Tribal Affairs used its Van Dhan Conclave to review how TRIFED's Van Dhan Vikas Kendras turn Minor Forest Produce into income for forest-dwelling communities.

What happened

• The Van Dhan Conclave, themed "Sustainable Livelihoods for Tribal India", was held on 29 March 2026 at Sunder Nursery, New Delhi, as part of Bharat Tribes Fest 2026, which runs until 5 April.
• It was organised by TRIFED (the Tribal Cooperative Marketing Development Federation of India) under the Ministry of Tribal Affairs, and inaugurated by Minister of State for Tribal Affairs Durgadas Uikey.
• The inaugural session carried remarks by TRIFED Managing Director M. Rajamurugan, a keynote by Additional Secretary Manish Thakur, and insights from Padma Shri Chaitram Devchand Pawar.
• Four thematic sessions were run: community engagement and grassroots solutions; legal frameworks and operational challenges; strengthening Van Dhan Vikas Kendra (VDVK) value chains; and expanding domestic and international market access.
• Government bodies, State governments, VDVKs, private firms, NGOs and international organisations took part — a review-and-coordination event rather than a new launch.
• The Ministry restated the headline numbers: 4,172 VDVKs sanctioned under the umbrella mission, plus 540 PVTG-specific VDVKs under PM-JANMAN.

Background & context

The conclave is best understood not as a one-off event but as a checkpoint inside a long chain of tribal-livelihood machinery built around Minor Forest Produce (MFP). MFP — also called Non-Timber Forest Produce (NTFP) — is defined in the Forest Rights Act, 2006 (the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act) to include all naturally occurring non-timber produce of plant origin: tendu leaves, bamboo, mahua flowers, honey, lac, gum, tamarind, sal seeds, wild medicinal plants and similar items. The same Act vests the right of ownership, collection, use and disposal of MFP in forest-dwelling Scheduled Tribes and other traditional forest dwellers — which is precisely what makes value-addition of MFP a livelihood lever the State can pull without disturbing land ownership.

The Van Dhan Yojana (formally the Van Dhan Vikas Karyakram / Van Dhan Scheme) was launched on 14 April 2018 — Ambedkar Jayanti — at Bijapur, Chhattisgarh, by the Ministry of Tribal Affairs, with TRIFED as the national nodal agency. Its operating unit is the Van Dhan Vikas Kendra (VDVK): the original design clustered roughly 15 tribal Self-Help Groups (SHGs) of about 20 members each into one Van Dhan Vikas Kendra Cluster of around 300 beneficiaries, equipped with tools, working capital and training to clean, grade, process and package forest produce. The aim is to move tribal collectors up the value chain — from selling raw mahua or honey to a middleman, to selling a branded, processed, higher-margin product — and to plug them into TRIFED's Tribes India retail network and the broader Minimum Support Price (MSP) for MFP scheme that fixes floor prices for notified forest produce.

The Van Dhan programme was originally implemented as a component of the "Mechanism for Marketing of Minor Forest Produce through MSP and Development of Value Chain for MFP" scheme. From 2021–22 the Ministry restructured its market interventions into a single umbrella, the Pradhan Mantri Janjatiya Vikas Mission (PMJVM), under which the Van Dhan Vikas Kendras now sit — which is why the conclave reports VDVK numbers under PMJVM rather than under a standalone Van Dhan line.

It helps to place Van Dhan inside the wider family of tribal-affairs interventions a complete note should carry, so that "which of these is under the Ministry of Tribal Affairs" or "match the scheme to its purpose" questions are survivable. The same ministry runs the MSP-for-MFP scheme (price support for notified forest produce), the Eklavya Model Residential Schools (EMRS) for tribal education, the Pre-Matric and Post-Matric Scholarships for ST students, the Development of PVTGs scheme, the National Fellowship and Scholarship for Higher Education of ST Students, and the PM-JANMAN and newer Dharti Aaba Janjatiya Gram Utkarsh Abhiyan (DAJGUA) saturation missions for tribal villages. Van Dhan is the livelihood-and-value-addition limb of this cluster; the others address price support, education, and area saturation. Distinguishing Van Dhan's value-chain role from MSP-for-MFP's price-floor role is the single most common confusion in this topic.

For Prelims

• Entity: Van Dhan Vikas Kendra (VDVK) — the field unit of the Van Dhan Yojana for value-addition of Minor Forest Produce.
• Launched: Van Dhan Yojana on 14 April 2018, at Bijapur (Chhattisgarh), on Ambedkar Jayanti.
• Nodal ministry: Ministry of Tribal Affairs · Implementing/nodal agency: TRIFED.
• TRIFED: Tribal Cooperative Marketing Development Federation of India — a national-level cooperative body set up in 1987 under the (then) Ministry of Welfare, now under the Ministry of Tribal Affairs; runs the Tribes India retail brand.
• Umbrella mission: Pradhan Mantri Janjatiya Vikas Mission (PMJVM) — the merged scheme that houses MFP marketing, MSP-for-MFP and the Van Dhan Vikas Kendras.
• Coverage (source-anchored): 4,172 VDVKs sanctioned under PMJVM, benefiting over 12.48 lakh tribal members.
• PVTG track (source-anchored): 540 PVTG-specific VDVKs sanctioned under PM-JANMAN, benefiting ~0.46 lakh members.
• PM-JANMAN: Pradhan Mantri Janjati Adivasi Nyaya Maha Abhiyan — launched 15 November 2023 (Janjatiya Gaurav Divas), targeted at Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTGs).
• PVTGs: a sub-set of Scheduled Tribes (75 groups officially recognised) marked by pre-agricultural technology, stagnant/declining population, low literacy and subsistence economy — a category that originated from the Dhebar Commission and the erstwhile "Primitive Tribal Groups" classification.
• MFP / NTFP: non-timber forest produce of plant origin; ownership vested in forest dwellers by the Forest Rights Act, 2006.
• Cluster design: the standard VDVK model groups ~15 tribal SHGs (~20 members each) into a ~300-member cluster.

Why it matters

The problem the Van Dhan model addresses is distributional, not just developmental. Forest-dwelling communities have historically been collectors at the bottom of the value chain — gathering high-value produce (mahua, lac, sal seed, honey, tamarind) but selling it raw to intermediaries at a fraction of its eventual retail value. A village that ships unprocessed mahua flowers captures only a sliver of what the same mahua earns once it is cleaned, graded, processed and branded. By siting cleaning, grading, processing, packaging and primary value-addition at the VDVK cluster level — and by routing the output through TRIFED's Tribes India channel and the MSP-for-MFP floor — the scheme tries to keep more of that margin inside the tribal economy.

It also matters because of who it reaches. India's MFP economy is concentrated in the forested, Scheduled-Area States — Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and the North-East — where alternative cash income is scarce and seasonal forest collection is often the only liquidity a household sees. The PVTG-specific track under PM-JANMAN is significant for a sharper reason: PVTGs are the most marginalised slice of the Scheduled Tribe population, and a dedicated set of 540 VDVKs for them is an attempt to reach communities that area-blind schemes routinely miss. The conclave's own four sessions — grassroots engagement, legal/operational frictions, value-chain strengthening, and market access — read as an honest admission that the binding constraints are now downstream: not the existence of produce, but processing quality, working capital, legal clarity around collection rights, and reliable buyers.

For Mains