This chapter examines how formal education in India continues to function as a site of alienation for tribal communities, reproducing structural hierarchies that disconnect learners from their linguistic, cultural, and ecological worlds. Drawing on six months of immersive fieldwork in three tribal padas of Toranmal in North Maharashtra, the chapter foregrounds the lived experiences of students, parents, teachers, village elders, and local administrators to illuminate the everyday negotiations that shape educational participation. Despite decades of policy interventions—from the Dhebar Commission to the Xaxa Committee—tribal education remains marked by linguistic exclusion, curricular irrelevance, cultural erasure, and systemic capability deprivation. The findings demonstrate a persistent tension between state-driven standardization and the need for culturally responsive education—highlighting a long-standing missed opportunity to develop hybrid educational models that honor both tribal epistemologies and contemporary educational goals. Against this backdrop, the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 appears as both a moment of possibility and a continuation of older policy contradictions. While its emphasis on multilingual education, community participation, and Indian Knowledge Systems gestures toward transformation, its highly centralized implementation structures, inadequate resource commitments, and limited engagement with tribal epistemologies constrain its emancipatory potential. Through an analysis of these gaps, the chapter argues that genuine reform requires a shift from tokenistic inclusion to structural localization—a framework that centers tribal knowledge, affirms mother-tongue learning, and reimagines education as a process co-authored with communities. The chapter presents localization as an alternative paradigm rooted in cultural belonging, experiential learning, and pedagogical autonomy. Through global case studies and the grounded example of the Jeevanshala schools, it demonstrates how community-driven, culturally embedded models enable education to become a site of rooted learning rather than dislocation. Ultimately, the chapter contends that the future of tribal education in India depends on institutionalizing localization as a transformative policy framework within the NEP 2020, with the aim of bringing about an epistemic shift from treating tribal knowledge as peripheral to treating it as equal with mainstream pedagogies.