Community radio centres in Tribal areas

Bhopal, July 14: For the first time in the country, community radio centres are being started in tribal-predominant areas. In this sphere also Madhya Pradesh has taken a lead over other states since first of these centres are being set up in ten districts of the state in the first phase with a view to conveying schemes for tribal development to the masses.

The places where community radio centres would be established include Baiga-predominant areas Chanrha in Dindori district and Baihar in Balaghat district, Korku-predominant Khalwa in Khandwa district, Gond-predominant Chicholi in Betul district, Bhil-predominant Nalchha in Dhar district, Bhabhra in Alirajpur district, Meghnagar in Jhabua district and Sirsi in Guna district, Sahariya-predominant Sesaipur in Sheopur district and Bhariya-predominant Bijori in Chhindwara district.

Due to novel efforts undertaken by Tribal Welfare Department of the state government, these community radio centres would be totally 'of the tribals, by the tribals and for the tribals'. This would not only preserve their culture and art, but would also lead to their educational, social and economic progress. These channels would go a long way in keeping the tribals living in almost inaccessible areas informed with the schemes aiming at their welfare.

The radio programmes would be prepared in Gondi, Bhili, Korku and other tribal dialects. The centres would be conducted by the local tribal communities. The preparations for setting up these two radio centres have been completed. The process of applying has also been completed and permission from Union Information and Broadcasting Ministry is round the corner.
The entire work for setting up these centres, officers' training and seminars for the local people in tribal-predominant areas would be conducted by Tribal Welfare Department's undertaking 'Vanya'.

Source: Central Chronicle

Migration and its Impact on the Tribal Communities

Migration is a complex phenomenon that is not amenable to any simplistic understanding. A number of socio-economic models purport to explain this phenomenon. The dual economy model understands migration to be a result of ‘urban pull’. Proponents of the theory claim that labour migration takes place when there is likelihood of getting higher-paid employment in urban rather than rural areas. The modified version of this model proposed by Todaro (1987) explains migration in terms of expectations regarding higher wages in urban than in rural areas, though these may not be realistic and may result in migration of a larger number of workers than urban areas can hold. This model thus states that migrants are free agents and make their own choices in favour of migration.

As opposed to this, the Marxist model stresses structural factors and the dominant classes’ extraction of surplus through exploitation. According to this model, labour is pushed out of peripheral areas and contributes to underpaid surplus labour in urban centres. A variant of this model attributes the push-out to ecological/ environmental factors.

Migration can be understood as a coping mechanism against unfavourable conditions in rural areas, as well as a means of bettering economic conditions. Less than 12% of tribals in India are able to meet their daily needs through agriculture alone; they are dependent on forest work, but the ban on logging has reduced this source of employment. It is here that migration to urban areas for work acts as a means of survival.

There is a definite linkage between migration and food security. While migration is a way of life in most tribal families, the extent of migration (number of people in the family migrating, distance and duration of migration) depends on how the family perceives its foodgrains security. For families with a slightly better food security situation, migration is mainly by young male workers, it is short-term, short-distance and combined flexibly with agricultural work. In the second case of households facing severe food insecurity, the entire household undertakes long-term, long-distance migration. These poorer households migrate immediately after the harvest, and the reason for this is that they have to repay the high-interest loans that they have taken under distress circumstances during the monsoon. In this sense, migration only serves to perpetuate dependence. Since one of the most important factors for migration and perpetual dependence is food insecurity, a system of subsidised food distribution is essential.

Migrants face harsh and almost inhuman working conditions. Long hours and unpaid overtime are expected conditions that have to be fulfilled if good relations are to be maintained with employers, an essential prerequisite to ensuring availability of work in later years. Employers do not provide protection either against risk of injury, health hazards or sexual exploitation at worksites: in fact in most cases employers and their agents are primarily responsible for sexual harassment of women migrants. Unsanitary conditions, poor diet and contaminated drinking water result in breakdown of health, strength and productive potential, and entail high medical costs which have to be borne by the migrants themselves. The very conditions which migrants seek to escape in the villages are prevalent, perhaps multiplied, in urban work centres.

Gender roles become more mainstreamed as there grows a sharpening of existing gender-linked division between paid and unpaid work. The task of women in the village, while men migrate for work, is perceived as less dignified and less important, while on the other hand women grow increasingly dependent on men for cash, and their bargaining power declines. Those women who migrate with their men are excluded from the public spaces where labour negotiations take place. They face greater strain as along with productive work they have to fulfil domestic duties in an unfamiliar environment, face health and childcare problems and many times sexual abuse as well.

Apart from the economically harsh conditions, migrants also face social indignity and isolation. They travel from a world where relations are well defined and they are respected members of a community, to one where they are ostracised as outsiders, uncivilised and dirty people. The world of caste discrimination is thrust upon them. While they were looked down upon by moneylenders and labour agents even in the village, there these moneylenders were in a minority among a large tribal community; here in the city the tribal migrants are not only poor, ‘uncivilised’, ‘low-caste’ but they also lose their strength of numbers. And when they return to their villages, their links with their roots are already loosened; long absence entails loss of reputation and social status, especially if they have not been in a condition to return to their villages for social occasions and festivals. Since tribal society is inseparably rooted in land and agriculture, to lose touch with the life of the land is to alienate oneself from one’s own; and this results in a definite loss of social position.

The world of the migrant tribal worker is not a pleasant one. Deeply attached to the culture, community and land, tribals are driven to unknown environments by circumstances not completely in their control. For some, of course, migration is a choice – but one that is exercised in absence of lucrative employment options in the village. For others, of course, it is an act of desperation forced by the simple inability to repay distress loans. The fact that generations of tribals have experienced the harsh conditions of migrant life and still continue to take that option shows that there is no other option locally available.

Need For The Orissa Adivasi Policy

Often uprooted from our traditional lands and ways of life and forced into prevailing national societies, we indigenous people/Adivasis face discrimination, marginalisation and alienation. Despite growing political mobilisation in pursuit of our rights, we continue to lose our cultural identity along with our natural resources. Some of us are in imminent danger of extinction.

During the last few years, the Adivasis' identity is at risk in Orissa. Owing to mushroom growth of industries, modernisation and consumerist market economy, the Adivasis are getting more and more marginalised. Various Government programmes like Adivasi Sub-plans, Special Component Plans, Primitive Adivasi Micro Projects, Modified Area Development Agency, Cluster and Dispersed Adivasi Development programmes and special education plan for their development have failed to achieve the desired results. Poverty and backwardness have become the constant companions of the Adivasis. In view of the growing marginalisation, deprivation, oppression and special unique social, economic, political characters and livelihood systems, there is a need to develop a policy keeping in mind long-term sustainable human development perspective.

The policy statement is based upon certain basic presumption. The position of the Adivasis in this respect is summarised as below:

1. The Adivasis of Orissa and their culture, traditional customs and systems are now at stake due to influence and intervention of out side forces.

2. Dams, Mining and industrial projects are causing large-scale displacement of Adivasis.

3. Though the Adivasi people have their own developmental aspiration but they are not benefited from the Government programmes designed to meet the needs and aspirations of dominant or mainstream population of Orissa. The Government programmes are piece meal in formulation and implementation.

4. In the last fifty years, in the absence of a policy frame work the Adivasis are in a disadvantageous position by loss of access to ancestral lands and natural resources and other sources of incomes having relationship with land, loss of culture, social structures and institutions, loss of Adivasi knowledge, loss of recognition as Adivasi people and lack of opportunity for effective participation in the state social, economic and political process.

The policy statement is aimed specifically at land, forest, health, education, culture of the Adivasis and the rights of Adivasi women in the state. The main purpose of the policy statement is to provide guidelines for the state to establish and formulate a comprehensive Adivasi policy. This will also provide a direction for shaping and formulating the law and policy of the Government to defend the sovereign status of the Adivasis. This policy statement is not an end point but merely a stepping point for better coordination consultation and collaboration among all Adivasi groups and the Government functionaries for better and effective functioning of Adivasi system and for maintenance of cultural and social identities.

Strengthening the national policy to eliminate discrimination against indigenous and tribal people

In order to effectively eliminate discrimination against indigenous and tribal people, the following elements should be considered in the national policy:

Legislation prohibiting and preventing discrimination in employment and occupation against indigenous people, as well as effective enforcement of such legislation. Ensuring access of indigenous and tribal people to judicial and administrative procedures.

Measures to protect indigenous and tribal people in the informal economy from work-related discrimination, forced labour and other exploitative labour practices.

Provisions to ensure that indigenous and tribal people can carry out their traditional occupations without undue restrictions and to this end recognizing their right to exist and to maintain their cultures, traditions and institutions in national law and policies.

Social dialogue on indigenous and tribal people’ and persons equal opportunities to access decent work.

Promotion of awareness and respect for indigenous cultures and traditions among non-indigenous segments of society.

Providing educational and training opportunities on at least an equal footing with the rest of the national community. Ensure that the training programmes offered are based on the practical needs, social and cultural conditions and economic environment relevant to the people concerned.

Consider the provision of bilingual and intercultural education. Consultation with and participation of indigenous and tribal people in the development and implementation of measures designed to promote their equality of opportunity and treatment in employment and occupation, including any special measures.

Mainstreaming the promotion of equal opportunities in employment and occupation in relevant national policies, such as land policies, poverty reduction strategies, rural or local development programmes, training policies, employment policies(including inter alia, active labour market measures, environmental policies, and gender policies).

Enhanced cooperation between governmental units responsible for labour and employment matters, human rights, or indigenous and tribal affairs.

Integration of a gender perspective in all measures undertaken to promote equality of opportunity and treatment of indigenous and tribal people.

Monitoring of the situation of indigenous people in employment and occupation on the basis of appropriate data (disaggregated by sex).

Call us adivasis, please!

By Gail Omvedt - A consulting sociologist, based in Kasegaon

If Adivasis were to start writing their own Discovery Of India, it would be something like this:

There are those who talk of India's "5000 year-old culture," there are those who talk of its "timeless traditions." If India has a timeless tradition, it is ours. The cultures running back for tens of thousands of years are the cultures of the many Adivasi communities in the subcontinent. We are Bhils, Gonds, Oraons, Mundas, Hos, Santals, Korkus and Irulas, the large and small groups of people who live today in the hilly areas of the country and are scattered across its central belt, we who have kept ourselves apart from feudal States and Brahmanic hierarchies for thousands of years, we who have resisted hierarchy and maintained our ancient collectivities and ways of life.

We were here before the founders of that Meluhha known to far-off Mesopotamia built their cities on the plains of the Indus. Before Mohenjo-daro and Harappa and Lothal, before drains were laid out, before seals began to be stamped and goods traded and granaries made, we lived off the forests, gathering the abundant food we found, sometimes burning down the trees for planting but always moving on to let the forest regenerate. We traded occasionally with the Indus cities, but we remained free; they never conquered us or tried to conquer us.

We were here before the Aryans came thundering in their chariots through the mountain passes; they could break the dams, flooding the plains and destroying the remnants of the Indus cities but they could not destroy us. They knew us as Nishada and Naga; they called us Rakshasa, they burned the forests to destroy us and free the land to fashion their agrarian society stamped with the hierarchy of caste. They were the ones who remembered us as their enemies. Ekalavya was one of our great archers, so skillful that the hero of the Aryans, Arjun, could not stand before him. But they assaulted him, cutting his thumb, destroying his ability to fight - and then fashioned a story in which he accepted Drona as his Guru and agreed to surrender his thumb! Ram was one of their heroes, given the task not only of destroying the Dravidians but also of slaughtering the rakshasas in the forests.

While the Indus civilisation was destroyed, its remnants absorbed into and providing the foundation for the developing Indian civilisation, our culture did not die. It is true that some of us were conquered and turned into village-bound peasants, or, enticed by religious cunning and the flourishing village society to become the Bahujans and Dalits of that society, farmers, craftsmen, labourers. All of these sections bear even today the marks of our democratic forms of government - panchayats, collective traditions, clan solidarity. But in accepting Brahmanism they accepted a tyranny of the mind, a poison of superiority and inferiority, purity and pollution.

We who refused this, who were not conquered, who were not enticed, who remained outside, who remained free - we are the Adivasis of today. Not all of our cultures are the same. We speak different languages, some Dravidian, some Mundari, some like those of the Nagas similar to the languages of China and Tibet, some related to the languages of our more caste-bound Indo-European speaking neighbors. Our religions are also different. Some follow the sarna religion with traditions linked to sacred grove, some know only the general sacredness of all nature and its beings. However, whatever their variations, our religions are of this world; we know nothing of karmakanda and moksha; our gods are not divine beings of mystery beyond our ken, but people like ourselves, our ancestors, even our friends.

We fought the British colonisers when they came. Our heroes like Birsa Munda, Khazya Naik, Tantya Bhil are remembered in our songs and legends but forgotten in your textbooks. Why is this, you who are so concerned about the history of national independence in your textbooks? In many ways, though, the British conquered us more thoroughly even than the earlier Aryans, taking away our autonomy as they extended control over the forests, making us "encroachers" on land that had been ours for ages. And they were the first to call us "tribals," for thinking of us primitive was the only way they could explain the difference between our equalitarian, community-oriented cultures and the hierarchical lives of peasant caste societies. With this, they romanticised us on the one hand, but also characterised us as children and arrogated to themselves the authority to control our lives and grab the wealth of the forests.

After Independence, with State control of the forests continuing, with cultivators moving in to capture our lands, and companies moving in to grab our timber, we became more "marginalised" than ever. Our rebellions had forced the British to pass some laws to protect us - but after Independence, those who held the land rights were called "landlords" and the people who had been encroaching on our lands got control over them as "tenants". The post-independent elites have continued the policy of the British they claimed to fight, calling us "tribals," treating us like conquered people, with few schools, no industry, no development, and above all maintaining in their own hands the control over our forest wealth.

Now as a result we have become landless labourers and poor farmers and day labourers, and some, forced to migrate from lands we have known for generations, the poorest of the refugees crowding the cities. You call us "girijan" and "vanvasi" as if we only knew hills and forests. We have the least education of all the Indian people and we are among the poorest; it is only those Adivasi communities in the North east who have States of their own who seem to have any prosperity, so not surprisingly many of us fight for States like Jharkhand. Now you are trying to weaken us with religious divisions, claiming some of us "Hindus" and others "Christians," and inciting vicious attacks by your thugs under the name of protecting Hinduism.

You constantly tell us to "join the mainstream" of independent India. But what is this "mainstream" you speak of? Is it the mainstream of cultures which force widows on to funeral pyres, of harassing young brides for dowry, of mumbling chants and pujas in a language that not even the priests really understand? Women in our societies may not quite have full equal rights, and we should change that part of our traditions that tries to keep them subordinate, that attacks them as "witches" if they try to claim land rights. But they are still more independent than women in the caste societies. Our young people chose their own partners, and our weddings are more democratic - where one Brahman or Christian priest controls the marriage ceremony among the so-called great religions, in our traditions the whole community sits together and announces its "agreement" to the marriage.

Finally, many of you romanticise us, and talk as if "development" is something for others, as if we should be "tribals" forever and live in a timeless world apart. We don't want to live apart, we want to be part of a true mainstream of equality and liberty, one we will fight for along with all others. We want schools, hospitals, education, computers, but we don't want them as gifts, with you pretending to be patrons. Give us back the lands and forests you have snatched away, let us develop our own wealth, let us have the profits gained out of sharing with the world our knowledge of medicines and herbs, and we can have all the development we need, under our own control. We are not against trade and exchange, but we want to be able to control the terms and conditions on which we trade. We want a development that will preserve the best parts of our culture, our sense of community and collectivity, our equalitarian life, our freedom. We do not believe that should be so difficult in the world today, but you seem to be following a different path. And finally, why not drop such senseless terms such as "Scheduled Tribe" and "anusuchit jamati" in the Constitution also and call us by our proper name, "Adivasis"?