Published Paper Details:

Education is fundamental to the socio-economic advancement of Scheduled Tribes (STs) in India; however, sustainability assessments often rely on isolated indicators such as literacy or enrolment, limiting holistic evaluation. This study introduces the Tribal Education Sustainability Index (TESI), a composite quantitative framework integrating Literacy Performance, Retention Efficiency, and Gender Parity into a unified sustainability metric. The model adopts a deterministic Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) structure and applies the Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) to rank longitudinal performance using secondary data from 2013-2016. The results classify tribal education as moderately sustainable with gradual improvement, with 2015-16 emerging as the most preferred year. However, retention efficiency is identified as the principal structural constraint, revealing the system's sensitivity to dropout fluctuations despite stable literacy and improving gender parity. The proposed TESI-TOPSIS framework offers a replicable and policy-relevant tool for quantitative sustainability assessment in marginalized educational contexts.