A/HRC/24/41/Add.3 27. In many parts of the region, indicators for access to education are significantly worse in areas with high concentrations of indigenous peoples, and illiteracy rates in those areas are high. The lack of education in indigenous languages, culturally inappropriate curricula, distance of schools from indigenous communities, and inadequate accommodation contribute to low levels of educational achievement and high dropout rates among indigenous peoples. While mother tongue education is provided in some places, the Special Rapporteur was informed that such programmes, overall, are lacking. 28. Reports received during the consultation also allege that indicators for health are worse in areas where indigenous peoples are living. Food insecurity, chronic hunger and malnutrition are serious issues facing the region’s indigenous peoples, with obvious impacts on health. These conditions are attributable in large part to indigenous peoples’ loss of lands, which has had a profoundly negative impact on their self-sustained means of subsistence. Traditional subsistence activities, including yak-raising, fishing, rice farming, and forest gathering, are also threatened by a range of infrastructure, development agroindustrial, and conservation projects. There are also allegations of widespread health impacts of extractive projects. 29. A related issue of concern is the lack of birth registration or citizenship documentation afforded to indigenous individuals in some countries, for varying reasons, which limits many indigenous peoples’ access to basic public services including for health and education. This situation reportedly contributes to an increased vulnerability of women and children to trafficking. Participants noted that some progress has been made in remedying this situation, although much more remains to be done. Furthermore, in some areas, indigenous groups are currently internally displaced as a result of armed conflict, and they suffer extreme social and economic hardship. 30. In some countries in the Asia region, resettlement programmes have been framed as developmental in nature, including programmes to cluster scattered indigenous communities in lowland villages in order to provide them with improved access to public services and infrastructure. However, indigenous organizations point to deterioration in indicators related to poverty, malnutrition, health and mortality in cases where communities have been relocated. b. Recognition 31. As discussed earlier, a number of Asian Governments have yet to accept the applicability of the concept of “indigenous peoples” to those groups in their countries that share characteristics similar to those of indigenous peoples in other regions of the world. In this regard, the notion that the entire population of the country is indigenous has been used as a justification for denying recognition of particular indigenous peoples as such. In regard to those countries in which some form of recognition is provided, participants in the consultation complained that the procedures through which recognition is afforded constitute limitations on indigenous peoples’ right to self-determination and opportunities for self-identification and definition. Further, procedural requirements in some countries to register as legal entities in order to obtain titles over lands, or to participate in government processes, was cited as a matter of concern in some countries. 32. According to the information received by the Special Rapporteur during the consultation, notions of “economic backwardness” and “primitiveness” continue to underpin the definition of groups in some countries. Further, discriminatory perspectives that indigenous peoples should be assimilated into mainstream society in order to address their “backwardness” are still reflected in the development polices of a number of countries. Another related concern among indigenous peoples in the region is in the perception of a significant divergence between official and actual population figures, which 10