The Ministry of Tribal Affairs (MoTA) will launch two national digital platforms during this year’s Janjatiya Gaurav Pakhwada — a National Forest Rights Act (FRA) Digital Platform that moves the entire forest rights claim process onto a single system, and Jan-HIT, a portal built with the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) that the Ministry describes as India’s first platform for tribe-disaggregated health data.
The launches were announced by the Ministry on 27 October 2026 as part of its plans for the fortnight-long observance from 1 to 15 November, which culminates in Janjatiya Gaurav Diwas on 15 November, the birth anniversary of Dharti Aaba Bhagwan Birsa Munda, according to a release issued through the Press Information Bureau (PIB).
Forest rights, end to end on one system
According to the Ministry, the National FRA Digital Platform will cover the full life cycle of claims under the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 — from the submission of claims by Gram Sabhas through to the issue of digitally signed titles. Recognition of forest rights has long involved multiple tiers of committees and paper files moving between village, sub-divisional and district levels, which makes tracking the status of an individual or community claim difficult for both claimants and administrators.
The platform has an unusual development history. MoTA had posed a problem statement on an AI-powered FRA Atlas and a WebGIS-based decision support system at Smart India Hackathon (SIH) 2025. In January 2026, the Ministry said it had become the first in the Government of India to bring all five SIH finalist teams — rather than only the winner — into a structured post-hackathon programme, working alongside technical experts from IIT Delhi and the National Informatics Centre (NIC) to co-develop a single national platform.
The components outlined by the Ministry at that stage included AI-powered digital archives to make FRA records structured and searchable, an FRA Atlas for spatial visualisation and real-time monitoring, a claimant-facing chatbot for information and grievance support, and a decision support system to aid evidence-based policymaking. Before that workshop, the student teams had visited FRA-implemented villages in Nashik district, Maharashtra, to validate their designs with Forest Rights Committees on the ground.
Jan-HIT: tribe-level health intelligence
The second launch, the Jan-HIT (Janjatiya Health Intelligence and Technology) Portal, has been developed with ICMR and will provide health data disaggregated by tribe across 20 States, the Ministry said. Health indicators for Scheduled Tribes are typically reported as a single aggregate, which can mask wide variation between communities; a tribe-wise view is intended to help target interventions more precisely.
Digital rails for last-mile delivery
The two platforms sit within a wider last-mile push planned for the fortnight. The Ministry said scholarship access camps in 73 districts are helping students with applications and Aadhaar seeding, while States will hold Aadhaar, Ayushman card and sickle cell screening camps, along with legal literacy camps on forest rights. About 1.54 lakh Adi Karmayogi volunteers across 76,963 villages are being trained through State administrative training institutes to support community participation, it added.
More than 300 projects for tribal communities — 228 ready for inauguration and 74 for foundation stone laying — are also lined up for Janjatiya Gaurav Diwas, the Ministry said.
Why it matters for e-governance
For governance practitioners, the FRA platform is a notable test of whether a rights-recognition process spanning Gram Sabhas, multiple administrative tiers and spatial records can be run as a single, auditable digital workflow ending in a digitally signed title. Its hackathon-to-production route also offers a template for ministries looking to turn citizen and student innovation into working public systems. Jan-HIT, meanwhile, points to a growing emphasis on granular, community-level data to guide welfare and health programmes for India’s tribal population.
Sources: Ministry of Tribal Affairs via PIB (27 October 2026; 6 January 2026); DD News (27 October 2026).