Introduction
Tribal Development in India has been problematical from the time of
independence. This has been due to a conflicting situation arising from the
opposition between the traditional community based subsistence economy of the Adivasis
and the modern market based growth oriented thrust of the mainstream economy.
The challenge for the State has been to integrate the Adivasis into the modern
economy in a manner that was beneficial to them. This has generally not been
possible because the Adivasis have lacked the requisite skills for this and the
government system for equipping them with these skills has malfunctioned.
Moreover, in order to save on the costs associated with modern development the Adivasis
have often not been recompensed and rehabilitated properly for the displacement
that they have had to face as resources have been extracted from their
traditional habitats.
Not surprisingly this has led to dissatisfaction on the part of the Adivasis.
This in turn has given rise to outright political revolt, rights based New
Social Movements of Adivasis and also an emergence of Non-Governmental
Organisations for bringing about better tribal development. Decentralised and
local community controlled development has been acknowledged as a major
desideratum for tackling tribal deprivation by scholars. With the award of the
Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences to Elinor Ostrom in 2009, even
mainstream economics has come to acknowledge the importance of collective
action for the management of common pool resources. This has also gained in
importance currently because of the benefits in terms of mitigation of climate
change that such communitarian natural resource management can achieve. The
collective action undertaken by the Bhil and Bhilala Adivasis in West-Central India
to secure their rights and entitlements and in the process mitigate climage
change are detailed here.
2. Traditional Bhil Society
The Bhil Adivasis in West-Central India have traditionally had a
communitarian culture based on a subsistence livelihood pattern that ensured
sustainable use of their natural resource bases. The important characteristics
of traditional Bhil society are as follows -
1.
Habitations of small
communities linked together by strong kinship ties
2.
Customs of labour pooling in
all social and economic activities
3.
System of interest free loans
in cash and kind
4.
Minimal interaction with the
external centralised trade based economy
5.
High dependence on forests for
daily as well as agricultural needs
6.
Social customs that ensured the
redistribution of the surplus of individual families among the community
There was thus a minimal role in this society for accumulation,
trade and monetary profits and so it continued for ages at a low level resource
use equilibrium. However, Bhil society is patriarchal like others and so women
have to bear the double burden of poverty and patriarchal oppression.
3. Colonial Dispossession
The Maratha invasion of the region in the late eighteenth century
and later the advent of the British colonialists in the early eighteenth
century the situation changed drastically. The penetration of the modern market
economy and the settling of non-tribal peasant farmers began in the Bhil areas.
This put the Bhils in a precarious situation with the beginning of a process of
alienation from their natural resource bases and their integration as ill paid
debt ridden labourers in the centralised market economy.
The British enacted the Indian Forest Act in 1865 and took vast
areas of community forests out of the control of forest dweller communities and
handed over their management to the Forest Department created by it and this
was the single most debilitating development for the Adivasis in India. Even
though this act was implemented only in the provinces directly controlled by
the British it nevertheless provided the new direction of commercial
exploitation of forests to forest management in the Princely States that
largely ruled over the Bhil areas and so they too were adversely affected.
4. Post Colonial Situation
Ironically, the coming of independence aggravated the livelihood
situation of the Bhils instead of
improving it. Most of the Bhil areas that were under the governance of
Princely States prior to independence were assimilated into the states of
Maharashtra, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan and the Indian Forest Act
(1927) (IFA) was implemented. Vast areas of forests which were earlier still
being managed by the Bhils with the Princely States only nominally in control,
were converted into Reserved Forests.
The Bhils mostly were illiterate and so did not understand the legal
procedures for conversion of their habitats into Reserved Forests and so lost
most of their lands. Under the IFA, the
government “can constitute any forest land or waste land which is the property
of Government or over which the Government has proprietary rights, a reserved
forest, by issuing a notification of this effect”. Settlement of rights was not
carried out and large areas remain unsurveyed even today. The history of forest
management thereafter has been one of continuous deprivation of the Adivasis
and is briefly described below followed by a description of the failure of
economic and social development schemes in Tribal areas.
4.1 Disempowerment and Maldevelopment of Bhil Adivasis
The situation of the Bhils was made worse by the fact that government
services like education, development extension and health have not functioned
properly and so the Adivasis have been deprived of the welfare benefits that
they were entitled to under various schemes. Finally the patriarchal nature of
Bhil society led to the burden of increasing poverty due to wrong development
policies falling disproportionately on the women. The necessity of bearing more
children to get male progeny has also led to a population explosion, increasing
pressure on the natural resource base.
4.1.1 Decline of Local Self Governance -
The most debilitating phenomenon immediately after independence was the
marginalisation of the customary community based local self governance systems
of the Bhils. The third tier of Panchayati Raj was not set up and instead the
power in rural areas was transferred to the bureaucracy and especially the
Forest Department and Police. The Forest Department staff took undue advantage
of the restrictive provisions of the Indian Forest Act to demand bribes from
the Bhils to allow them access to the forests without which they could not
survive but which had become legally proscribed. The Police interfered with the
traditional communitarian dispute resolution mechanisms of the Bhils and
instead forced them to report their problems to the Police leading to
unnecessary arrests and litigation. Even
though the Bhils elected their own representatives to the state and national
legislatures due to the policy of reservation this did not translate into power
for the Bhils at large as the elected representatives went along with the
overall policy of marginalisation of the Adivasis.
As a result, the general Bhil population was completely disempowered
and left at the mercy of the bureaucracy. This disempowerment is the root cause
of the mal-development of the Bhil areas. The specific micro level needs and
aspirations of the Bhils have not been articulated and so macro level
development policies that have been pursued have been inimical to them.
Thus, the actual state policy that evolved for Bhil tribal areas was
as follows - “ top priority has been given to a programme of rapid
industrialisation and extension of means of communication to the most interior
regions. Our firm view is that the development of land and agriculture alone
will not be adequate for the rehabilitation of the tribal communities.
Agricultural land is insufficient and cannot serve the needs of even half the
tribal population. The tribal areas are rich in industrial and power potential.
There is no reason why in the wider interest of the nation and in the long-term
interest of the Adivasis themselves, industries should not be developed and
localised in tribal areas”.
4.1.2 Industrial Development versus Tribal Development - The assumption that industrial development in tribal areas is in
the long-term beneficial to them has been proved to be totally fallacious.
Invariably Adivasis are not rehabilitated and compensated properly for the loss
of their traditional livelihoods and neither they are trained to gain
employment in the new industries that are set up. The industrial areas set up
on tribal lands in West-Central India are an example of this. The government
provided cheap land and other subsidised infrastructure to the industrialists
along with tax-holidays but the displaced Adivasis were given only pittances as
compensation. Not being educated or skilled they did not get any of the
permanent jobs that were created and are even today working as casual
labourers. Pithampur, Indore, Vadodara, Ahmedabad, Surat and Kota, which are
the main industrial centres in West-Central India in fact draw in Bhils from
the whole region as casual labourers.
The other fallacious assumption is that agricultural land was
insufficient to provide suitable livelihoods to the Adivasis. Inadequate
attention was paid to developing the productivity of dryland agriculture on
sub-optimal soils in upper watersheds on which the Bhils are dependent. Instead
stress was put on developing green revolution agriculture on the plain lands
with irrigation and chemical inputs. This was totally unsuitable to the hilly
dry land farms of the Bhils. Today the green revolution technologies are
proving to be unsuitable for the areas where they were started off with in the
1960s in Punjab and Haryana primarily due to soil quality degradation and
lesser and costlier avialability of water and chemical inputs.
A resource conservation policy for land, water and forests, a
research and development policy for the traditional organic agriculture of the Adivasis
and appropriate technology for processing agricultural and forest produce
combined with a vibrant local government system with a clear gender focus to
counter the internal patriarchy of Bhil society would have worked wonders if it
had been implemented. Appropriate education and health systems incorporating
tribal knowledge would have been a bonus that would have produced a new
generation of Adivasis able and ready to take on the development challenges
faced by their community. This was not done and so the human development
indices in the Bhil tribal areas have remained the poorest in the country.
5. Mobilisation of Bhil Adivasis
The Bhil Adivasis of West-Central India began mobilising from 1970s
onwards primarily for their basic constitutional rights. Later this movement
spread to include the integration of the Bhils into the modern market system
without exploitation by moneylenders, traders and corrupt government officials.
Currently the umbrella organisation of Bhil Adivasis in West-Central India is
the Adivasi Ekta Parishad.
The introduction of the special Panchayat Raj for Scheduled Tribal
areas under the provisions of the Panchayat Extension to Scheduled Areas Act
1996 (PESA) gave a boost to the work of mobilisation. The provision in PESA Act
that the tribal Gram Sabha is to be the final arbiter on all issues of local
development and that this Gram Sabha could be as small as a hamlet of a village
made it easier to implement development programmes. Often it is not possible to
carry the whole village together on some development programme because the
tribal hamlets of a village are situated at a distance from each other. Another
law that promises to have far reaching consequences is the Scheduled Tribes and
Other Traditional Forestdwellers (Recognition of Rights) Act 2006 (FRA) which
gives rights to the land that the Adivasis have been cultivating and also
community rights to the forests in which they have been residing. Finally there
is the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme which if
properly implemented can in addition to providing employment to the Adivasis
also improve the natural resource base of their habitats.
The specific mobilisational strategies adopted that have got the
people to act collectively for getting their entitlements and the conservation
of natural resources for climate change mitigation are –
- Problem analysis workshops
in which the people have participated in open discussions to pinpoint the
problems they were facing.
- Legal and rights training
workshops in which the people were taught the basics of the liberal
democratic framework.
- Collective Action for
assertive rights through public demonstrations and sitins.
- Revival of traditional
labour and resource pooling customs.
- Special women's meetings to
get them involved in resource conservation work and also public
demonstrations and also counter the internal patriarchy of Bhil society.
- Legal and policy advocacy
to change the laws and rules in favour of the Adivasis.
6. Gaining Access to Forests and then Conserving them
The mass mobilisation began with the problem of ensuring access to
the encroached farms of the Adivasis in the reserved forest. As a solution to
this problem it was decided to protect the remaining forest area and prevent it
from degradation. This was done to counter the claim of the forest department
that the Adivasis were destroying the forest. Consequently, social protection of the forests to ensure their
regeneration was undertaken. Small groups patrolled the forests by turns through
a labour pooling system. The fodder generated from such protection is cut and
bought by the members at the end of the monsoon season and the money thus
generated is kept in a fund for carrying out plantation work. This forest
protection has considerably increased the availability of fodder, fireweood and
non-timber forest produce in the study watershed and this has especially
benefited the women and children who are the main collectors of forest
products. It may be mentioned here that tribal children treat the collection of
forest produce as a playful activity and it is not labour for them. This is how
they come to know their natural environment. Greater fodder availability has
facilitated goat and buffalo rearing and so increased the supplementary incomes
from animal husbandry which provides an insurance against livelihood shocks to
the tribal households. It is not possible to quantify the increase in forest
product availability because of a lack of records but people say that they now
enjoy much greater forest product availability and have bigger herds of goats
and cattle than earlier.
7. Soil and Water
Conservation
The villagers organised
themselves into small groups of ten to twelve farmers each who then pooled
their labour and cooperated with each other to perform their agricultural
operations together and also undertake soil and water conservation activities.
This was a revival of the traditional labour pooling custom of the Bhils called
Dhas. In this system people used to work together to do agricultural operations
on each others' fields, build each others' houses, and improve the quality of
the farm fields through soil conservation work. However, this traditional
labour pooling custom is dying out because of their integration into the
mainstream money economy and the exploitation by the forest department staff.
A major feature of this
cooperative soil and water conservation work is the participation of women in
it. As is well known the ravages of natural devastation caused by bad
development are mostly borne by women. Consequently it is not surprising, that
when offered an opportunity to cooperate to reduce their drudgery, women come
forward enthusiastically. This has not only ensured that women have
participated in the community actions and improved their status in society but
they have also as a result, changed the gender relations at home.
The intensive soil and
water conservation work and the forest conservation have together ensured that
both natural and artificial recharge in the watersheds have increased
considerably and as a result the streams are flowing throughout the year. The
farmers have used this enhanced water availability to cultivate dryland
varieties of wheat which require less water. The greater availability of animal
manure has resulted in the farmers using treated organic manure in larger
quantities and improving the quality of the soil. The soil and water conservation
work has also ensured the greater availability of soil moisture and so double
cropping has become possible even without irrigation in some of the upper
fields where a crop of gram is taken. In some cases the kharif jowar crop after
being harvested, regenerates to give a small rabi yield from the soil moisture.
8. Implementation of the
FRA
The FRA has been plagued
with problems right from the beginning. Even though the Act was passed in 2006
it took another year for the Rules to be framed and passed by parliament. Even
after that Governments have been very tardy in setting in motion the process
for application and verification of the rights of the Adivasis. The people have
had to organise many demonstrations to first get the process started and then for
it to continue. The people have also pro-actively used the MGNREGS to carry out
soil and water conservation works on the lands for which they have gained lease
rights under the FRA.
An associated achievement
of the people is their success in getting the proposal by the Government to set
up a Wild Life Sanctuary in the Katthivada Forest Range of Alirajpur district
in Madhya Pradesh cancelled. Under the provisions of the PESA Act and also the
Wild Life Protection Act any displacement of people in a scheduled tribal area
has to be sanctioned by the Gram Sabha. Hard mobilisation by the people forced
the Government to implement this provision and the Gram Sabhas unanimously
rejected the proposal because of its many infirmities and it had to be shelved.
This is the first time that a proposal for a Wild Life Sanctuary in this
country has had to be shelved due to strong legal and mass action by the Adivasis.
9. Conclusions
The most important achievement is that the Adivasi Ekta Parishad has
been able to inspire the Adivasis to assert their identity and clearly
demarcate their sovereignty over their habitats. The laws and rules for
utilisation of the forests were that laid down by the government and
administered by the Forest Department and were not matched to the local needs
and conditions. The Adivasi Ekta Parishad succeeded in mobilising the people
through regular meetings and trainings to stand up for their rights against the
forest department staff and design their own rules for governing the use of the
collective natural resources. A section of the people initially
braved the opposition of the traditional Patels who were agents of the Forest
Department and even went to jail fighting for their rights and established the
organisation. Once the organisation was established and natural resource
conservation work began, the benefits began to flow and this acted as a
reinforcing factor in the continuation of the process and so later even the
Patels, who were initially opposed to the process, later became a part of it.
The mobilisation process
resulted in a fairly strong people's organisation spread over the whole of the
Bhil Adivasi homeland and the people were able to ensure that the Forest Department
was forced to allow them to manage their common resources according to their
own rules. The monitoring of the forests as well as the soil and water
conservation work is done by the people themselves and that is why the system
has worked very well for over three decades. The people have developed a system
of sanctions beginning with fines for small infringements of the rules and
going upto ostracism for more serious violations and this is administered by
the people themselves. The traditional community conflict resolution mechanisms
of the Bhil Adivasis have also been revived and these are also working very
well.
However, unless the government ensures a participatory framework of rule
making and monitoring at several levels it is difficult for a people's
organisation to build up a larger movement of conservation. Since the
government through the forest department and police has actively opposed the
people's mobilisation it has taken place only in isolated patches in the Bhil
homeland. The laws and policies
that favour Adivasis are not implemented primarily because most people are not
aware of these provisions and the Government is not serious about them. The Adivasi
Ekta Parishad by raising the awareness of the Adivasis in this regard has
brought about a positive transformation in West-Central India. Thus, despite
its limitations, the mobilisation process described above has ensured justice
for the Bhil Adivasis and provided them with a better livelihood situation
while simultaneously making a significant contribution towards climate change
mitigation.
