How KISS University is Rewriting India’s Tribal Story

he1990s presented India and Odisha with converging crises. Globalization arrived with promises, but for tribal communities, liberalisation, industrialization and globalisation (LPG Raj) meant displacement.

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Industrial corridors were being carved through ancestral lands. The adivasis of Odisha found themselves pushed to society's margins, watching their forests vanish and their futures evaporate. Maoist insurgency found ground in this despair. Young adivasis, seeing no future, picked up arms instead of textbooks.

I witnessed this firsthand when I was twenty-five years old, almost three and a half decades back. Tribal children dreams extended no further than survival. Education was unthinkable. Health care existed only in reports. In that moment, a clarity emerged. The permanent solution could only be quality education and not tokenistic intervention but a complete solution addressing every barrier.

I laid the foundation of Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (KISS). It began with 125 poor tribal children in 1992-1993. Today, we serve 80,000 tribal students. Over 800,000 have been impacted directly and indirectly through KISS. We became the world's largest tribal residential institute and, after deemed university status in 2017 from Government of India for which I worked diligently and relentlessly for years, KISS Deemed to be University is the world's only university exclusively for indigenous scholars.