Introduction: The tribal population in India is 74.6 million (8.2% to the total population). The largest number of tribal are in undivided Madhya Pradesh (16.40 million), followed by Orissa (7 million) and Jharkhand (6.6 million). There are 573 Scheduled Tribes living in different parts of the country, having their own languages, which are different from the one mostly spoken in the state where they live. There are more than 270 such languages in India. Methodology: A questionnaire was developed for collecting the detailed information about the child (name, age, gender, and birth order), parental consanguinity, child rearing health practices and socio economic status .The ages of the children were obtained from birth record and also interviewing mother with the help of local event calendar. Socioeconomic status of the study subjects was classified into Class I ( 3239), Class II (16203239), Class III (9721620), Class IV (486972) and Class V (< 486) by using modified B.G. Prasad Classification based on Consumer Price Index of December 2009 of 657 (Correction Factor = 32.39) Results: According to this study 61.8% of tribal children were exclusively breast fed for less than 6 months, 20.4% for 6 months and 17.8% for more than 6 months. Among nontribal children 46.6% were exclusively breast fed for less than 6 months, 49% for 6 months and only 4.4% for more than 6 months. Conclusion: Parental consanguinity were observed in 62.6% of children in tribal population and 20.8% of children in non tribal population.

Keywords: Tribal; Non Tribal; Socio Demographic Characters.