those states where there was higher concentration of tribal population, which included Eastern and North Eastern regions. The process of opening new departments of anthropology continues even today. In more than 90 percent of the universities anthropology departments are having an integrated course outline where all sub-disciplines of anthropology are being taught. Anthropology and anthropologists in India played important roles in the Annual Conferences of the Indian Science Congress Association in pre-independence and post-independence periods.Notable sectional presidential lectures were delivered by B.S.Guha(1938), T.C.Das(1941), S.S.Sarkar(1951), D.N.Majumdar(1946) and N.K.Bose(1963) who highlighted the contributions of both Indian and foreign anthropologists in all the sub-disciplines of the subject. In contrast to Europe, Indian anthropologists paid more importance to the collection of data from the field rather than on building theories. In this context the seminal contributions of S.R.K. Chopra(1931-1984) of Panjab University deserve mention. Professor Chopra discovered pre-hominid fossils from the Siwalik hills, which documented the important stages of human evolution and also designed an instrument known as 'pelvimeter' for measuring angles of the pelvis in primates including humans. Nirmal Kumar Bose after joining the Anthropological Survey of India in 1959 as Director involved all researchers in a mega project to collect data on the socio-economic and cultural aspects of villages covering 311 districts of India out of 322 and the results of this survey was published in a volume entitled Peasant life in India: A Study in Indian Unity and Diversity in 1961.The plethora of data on the material and ideological aspects of rural India contained in the book is one of the best works done by the anthropologists in the government department. This is a book which has tremendous contemporary policy relevance at least for three important reasons. First this book revealed with empirical information that peasant life in India cannot be improved without understanding its material diversity. Second, it showed the real value of collecting first hand information from the peasants, which should be the guiding principle behind planning and policy formulation from below, not from the top. Third, peasant life in India has an underlying cultural unity of non-competitive tolerance and peaceful coexistence, which shaped the ambition and aspiration of the peasants throughout the centuries. At the end of his life N.K.Bose in his posthumous article spoke out on the role of anthropologists in nation building in unequivocal terms An anthropologist does not merely play the part of an observer