Steen Pagan is a research scholar at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and working on the indigenous knowledge practices of Kharia tribe. He has been working on tribes since long and associated with different tribal unions, organizations and people. His birth name is Debarchan Mirdha and belongs to a tribal family from Odisha. Being a tribal, he is interested in his own people and others to bring light the tribal issues on the frontline. He is working for the overall development of tribal in the country academically and physically. He was serving as a civil servant in Odisha, but his enthuse and passion for tribal upliftment dragged him into the academic research to understand the root causes of different problems of backward people such as tribal. The strong willingness and hard work gave him many successes academically and the combine efforts of internal motivation enforced him to come with this piece of work.
He has worked hard to bring the tribal issues through his different works in the forms of books such as schooling and dropouts among the tribal children, mental health and placement of tribal teachers and social implications of dropout among tribal in India. Besides this, he is now working on another book on academic achievement of tribal students. His passion in academic motivates to work on the indigenous knowledge practices and habitations of tribal in Jharkhand.