Tripura’s push to place tribal development at the heart of its governance priorities gathered momentum on Friday, with Chief Minister Manik Saha announcing that more than 40 per cent of the 2025-26 budget has been earmarked for tribal welfare. The state’s overall budget outlay for the next fiscal stands at Rs 32,000 crore.
Addressing a programme at Chailengta in Dhalai district, Saha said Tripura’s progress was fundamentally linked to the advancement of its tribal communities. “Driven by this reality, the state government has kept over 40 per cent of the budget for tribal area development during the 2025-26 financial year. The government is also focusing on skill development of the tribal, especially the resettled Bru people,” he said.
Thousands of Bru families, who fled ethnic violence in Mizoram in the late 1990s and remained in relief camps for decades, were permanently rehabilitated in Tripura after a quadripartite agreement was signed in 2020. The state government has since been working to integrate the community into local economic and social structures.
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Saha said the Skill Development Department had intensified training initiatives for the Bru population under the PM Kaushalya Yojana and Mukhyamantri Dakkhata Yojana. He referred to Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s earlier visit to a resettled Bru village in Ambassa, during which Shah noted that “providing houses, water, and other benefits would not be enough for sustainable livelihood for them”.
“The Skill Development Department is providing training to them. The Bru people have said that they are happy and thanked Prime Minister Narendra Modi. We must provide skills to the Bru people to ensure their employment,” Saha said.
He added that successive governments had failed to seek a lasting solution for the Bru community’s displacement. “The BJP-led government, on humanitarian grounds, solved their issues by signing an agreement. Our government is with you and working for your development. The government is working to make people self-reliant,” he said.
The Chief Minister said the resettlement process had been finalised across 12 locations in the state. “We have provided toolkits to 895 people and driving licences to 200, for which Rs 1.45 crore was spent,” he said.
Earlier in the day, Saha distributed toolkits to trained Bru candidates and virtually inaugurated new buildings for a school and several government departments.
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