People of India : introduction

The People of India project (POI) was launched by the Anthropological Survey of India on 2 October 1985. The objective of the project was to generate a brief, descriptive anthropological profile of all the communities of India, studying the impact on them of change and the development process, and the linkages that bring them together. This project covered the whole country, each state and union territory, unlike the surveys in the colonial period which covered only British India and a few princely states It was possible, through the POI, to identify, locate and study 4635 communities throughout India.

The operations were on an enormous scale. Apart from the Anthropological Survey personnel, it involved scholars from university departments of anthropology, tribal research institutes and other research organizations. Workshops and rounds of discussion, extensive fieldwork and interviews with thousands of informants have helped generate the data base. At an early stage of the project it was decided to transfer the data to computer, and to develop what is probably the first software in the country - and one of the first in the world-in ethnography.

The People of India project has been acclaimed às an ethnographic project more ambitious than any other in the world, a project which will make India one of the leading countries in terms of information and knowledge about its people; one that will influence social science research and culture policy for many years to come. It is the beginning of the discovery of the people of India in greater depth, the first step towards the building up of a comprehensive information system on the people of India which will reflect, for the benefit of students, researchers, planners and administrators, the vibrant process of the transformation of the Indian people.