Dantewada District, also known as Dantewara District or Dakshin Bastar District (South Bastar District), is a district in the Indian state of Chhattisgarh. Dantewada is the district headquarters. The district is part of Bastar Division. Until 1998, Dantewada District was a tehsil of the larger Bastar District.

As of 2011 it is the third least populous district of Chhattisgarh (out of 18), after Narayanpur and Bijapur.[1]

Before Indian Independence, the district was part of the princely state of Bastar. After Independence in 1947, Bastar's ruler acceded to the government of India, and the erstwhile state became part of Bastar District of Madhya Pradesh state. Bastar District was divided into the districts of Bastar, Dantewada, and Kanker in 1998. In 2000, Dantewada was one of the 16 Madhya Pradesh districts that constituted the new state of Chhattisgarh. Dantewada was bifurcated in 2007, resulting in a new district Bijapur district, Chhattisgarh with four tehsils: Bijapur, Bhairamgarh, Usoor and Bhopalpatnam. It was further bifurcated in 2012, resulting in another new district, Sukma, with three tehsils: Chhindgarh, Sukma and Konta. In Ramayana this region considered as Dandakaranya.

Dantewada received the Prime Minister's award for converting Palnar into a cashless village. After the November 8 demonetization of high-value notes, The then district collector  and his team managed to procure fiber and bandwidth from Essar Steel under its corporate social responsibility to create a free wi-fi zone of two and half square km area to kick-start digital payments in the village market that houses 14 shops.