Cultural Diversity Among Uttarakhand’s Tribal Communities: A Review Of Its Significance For Value Education

Abstract

India’s tribal heritage embodies living traditions of moral learning, ecological wisdom, and community cooperation. In Uttarakhand, tribal groups such as the Tharu, Bhotia, Jaunsari, Raji, and Buksa have preserved diverse cultural systems that transmit values through everyday life rather than formal schooling. This review paper explores how these indigenous traditions can inform and enrich contemporary value education. Adopting a qualitative, interpretive, and review-based design, the study synthesizes secondary data from ethnographic research, government reports, and educational policy documents, including the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020. A thematic analysis approach was employed to identify core moral, social, and ecological values within tribal cultural practices and to assess their educational relevance. The findings reveal that Uttarakhand’s tribal communities nurture holistic value systems emphasizing harmony with nature, collective welfare, truthfulness, and mutual respect. These systems align closely with the objectives of modern value education, particularly in promoting empathy, sustainability, and social cohesion. The study concludes that integrating indigenous values and knowledge into educational curricula can make learning more inclusive, experiential, and culturally grounded. Recognizing tribal culture as an educational resource rather than an artifact of the past offers a pathway toward more humane and contextually relevant education in India that unites moral growth with cultural continuity.