THE indigenous peoples or adivasis in India have not fared well in the area of poverty reduction. The incidence of poverty was higher among adivasis in 1999-2000 at 44%, while that among ‘others’ (i.e. non-adivasi, non-dalit) was 16%. Between 1993-94 and 1999-2000, while the poverty ratio among dalits fell from 49% to 36%, and that of ‘others’ (non-dalit, non-adivasi) even more from 31% to 21%, that of adivasis fell from 51% to just 44% (Antony, Dayal and Karan, 2004. p. 2). Whether in the incidence of poverty or the reduction in its incidence, the adivasis are clearly doing much worse than the rest of the Indian population.

It almost goes without saying that the condition of the adivasis is more distressing in various other respects, whether health or education, with adivasi women faring even worse. The only area where the adivasis are over-represented is in the category of ‘internally displaced people’. Though under 8% of the population, they constitute at least 55% of displaced people (Ministry of Tribal Affairs, 2004, p. 2).

This condition of indigenous peoples is not peculiar to India. Reviews across Asia (IFAD, 2003) and Latin America (van Genugten and Perez-Bustillo, 2001) both show that the incidence of poverty among indigenous peoples is much higher than among the rest of the population.

The indigenous peoples in different parts of Asia face some problems in common. Consequently, in the rest of this paper there will be reference to indigenous peoples not only in India but also in other countries of Asia.

 

 

The question of development is one of political economy; it is also one of democratic rights. One of these rights, whether stated or not, is that of a community, people or individuals to be referred to by a name that has dignity. Dignity is different from honour, in that the latter establishes inequality (if all get an honour, then it has no meaning) while the former is democratic – all can have dignity (Taylor, 1994). In the pre-colonial period, indigenous peoples were called by various pejorative names – ‘black barbarians’ and ‘white barbarians’ in China, or mleccha in India. They were generally considered outside the pale of civilization, not having a different civilization. Civilization and indeed the cultivation of a moral sense was supposed to be predicated upon the destruction of the indigenous peoples and their ways of life. They were considered to have no moral sense, not with a different moral sense.

As with movements of other oppressed peoples, the indigenous peoples’ movements have also included the demand to be referred to by non-pejorative terms. As they have developed, terms like ‘tribal’ have become pejorative in connotation. There is a difference between indigenous peoples and those living in state societies, but the difference is given a pejorative connotation by certain terms like ‘tribal’ or even worse, ‘primitive tribal group’ (the official Indian term for hunter-gatherers).

It is in the spirit of using terms that are considered to have dignity that the now internationally common term ‘indigenous peoples’ is used. Indigenous peoples in Asia are now referred to officially by a number of designations – scheduled tribes in India, national minorities or minority nationalities in China and Vietnam (though those terms can also refer to other minorities like Muslims or Tibetans in China), hill tribes in Thailand. What is common to these communities is that they have generally been outside the ambit or only loosely incorporated under the pre-colonial states of Asia. Generally populating hill-forest regions, they have often been on the borders.

 

 

Their production systems ranged from hunting gathering in some cases to swidden agriculture, combined with some terrace cultivation. Production was largely of the extensive rather than intensive type, with few external inputs in cultivation. Human labour was the main external input; there was little of animal power in production. Trade was carried on in order to acquire goods that could not be locally produced like iron or salt. There were forms of individual or family property combined with community management of parts of the land. Class differences were not particularly sharp.

Gender inequalities existed at various levels, but did not constitute full-blown patriarchy. Even matrilineal communities privileged men in community and more so in household decision-making. The struggles to establish gender inequalities were often accompanied by extensive forms of violence against women (Nathan, Kelkar and Yu Xiaogang, 1998) in the form of denunciation as witches (dain, toni in Jharkhand or Chhattisgarh in India) or keepers of evil spirits among the Naxi in Yunnan, China and various Tai-speaking communities across Southeast Asia).

Most were not quite acephalous (or headless) communities, but where chiefdoms did exist they did not have standing armies or regular bureaucracies. Since class differences were low and the people armed, this made them formidable in their resistance to attempts at state rule, whether by the pre-colonial or colonial states.

 

 

The post-colonial states, as expected, retained these indigenous peoples within their boundaries. Particularly where they were on the borders of a number of countries, the post-Second World War decolonization led to many movements of these indigenous peoples for independence. The region encompassing the border areas of China, India, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos and Vietnam has been one vast region of continuing conflict. The late 1990s separation of East Timor from Indonesia is one example of a successful struggle of indigenous people’s for independence.

But conflicts have continued even within these countries. India has witnessed struggles for the formation of separate states by various indigenous peoples, starting with Meghalaya in the North East, to the more recent formation of Jharkhand or Chhattisgarh in the central Indian belt. Similar in nature are the autonomous regions of China. The Indian states and the Chinese autonomous regions share a characteristic of substantial control over revenue and expenditure. This, as in the Indian states of Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh, would enable them to utilize local revenues locally instead of their being exported to other capitals.

The question of self-determination of indigenous peoples can be seen from the above examples to carry two possibilities – either that of independence, achieved only in the rare instance of East Timor, or that of the formation of a state or autonomous region with substantial revenue powers. This puts in place two critical factors in development. First, local revenue can be used locally, for infrastructure or whatever, but in any case not becoming a drain from the economy. Second, it sets up a state with which the indigenous people can in some sense identify. Ethnically the state is not alien, as was for instance Assam state to the Khasi and Garo of Meghalaya, or Bihar state to the Jharkhandis.

 

 

There, however, is yet another dimension to self-determination, that of the ownership of resources, particularly forests. The colonial state invariably appropriated forests as state property, and post-colonial states continued in the same vein. Community lands, including forests, were taken over as state property. Timber, minerals and other useful products were monopolized by state ownership and the incomes used for accumulation by the ‘national’ capitalist classes and their states. In the guise of ‘national’ or ‘public’ interest even privately-owned lands were taken over by the states.

Along with the above, the administration of these regions turns the indigenous peoples into second-class citizens. They are unique in being subject to the legally arbitrary rule of forest department officials, who unlike other officials also have the power of the police and judiciary. This is not only a denial of the human rights of indigenous peoples but also affects their economic capacity, as the indigenous peoples are turned into interlopers on their own lands and are forced to pay various extortions to forest department officials in order to carry on their day-to-day economic activities.

The above extreme forms of exploitation and denial of human rights of the indigenous peoples has provided the base for various demands for separate states of the indigenous people’s regions, like the recently formed Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand. The expectation is that this would lead to a devolution of revenues, in the manner that is otherwise achieved in China by the devolution of various taxes to the county and township levels.

 

 

Along with the devolution of tax revenues it is also necessary to reform the property rights systems in forests. To enable the indigenous peoples to resolve some of the acute questions of poverty, the right to manage the forests and to sell various forest products needs to devolve onto the local communities. This would require a change in the nature of the forest department from being a manager of forests to becoming a provider of technical services on forestry. This is being attempted in Nepal, where the village community now substantially manages the forests, and the forest department merely provides technical and other facilitation, as is the case with say agricultural departments, and is no longer the manager of forest lands. Further, it is also necessary to acknowledge the labour and other management contributions of the upland, indigenous peoples in supplying various environmental services and products like hydrological regulation and biological diversity.

These environmental services and products are now taken free from the indigenous peoples. Even where indigenous peoples do have property rights over these resources (as in North East India where, other than in Assam, most forests are community or privately owned, or in Yunnan, China) the state often steps in to determine the use of these forests, supposedly in the ‘national good’. The Supreme Court of India and the central government of China both instituted ‘logging bans’ in the late 1990s as measures of environmental protection or flood control. They can only be described as a form of eco-colonialism. Having transformed the lowlands in the manner that maximizes current income, the upland peoples are being asked to sacrifice any income they might get from the forests in order to preserve nature and the environmental balance.

 

 

As opposed to such forms of eco-colonialism it would be better to provide incentives to the indigenous peoples to provide the quantities and qualities of environmental services that are required for the national or global good on the basis of compensation for these services. Accepting their property rights over these resources as including the right to manage them, and enabling the indigenous peoples to sell these products and services, would have the effect of linking improved livelihoods in the uplands with an increased supply of needed environmental services and products. In a number of instances in both China and Nepal, upland communities are now being paid or otherwise compensated for the supply of water of required quantity and quality to lowland cities. This, of course, has for long been a feature of Switzerland, where the mountain cantons own and sell water to downstream users.

These questions of property and human rights and the resulting extreme poverty lie at the heart of the sustained support given by indigenous peoples to the various peasant insurgencies. The formation of separate states may resolve some issues of devolution of revenues but not that of property rights of the indigenous peoples. This is seen in the instance of Jharkhand, where the new government continues with the earlier Bihar policy of replacing what little community management of forests there is, as in the khuntkatti areas, with the so-called Joint Forest Management financed by the World Bank,¹ forcing the state into the process. This retrograde process is occurring even in Uttaranchal, where the van panchayats are being supplanted by World Bank-financed JFM institutions (Madhu Sarin, 2001). A resolution of indigenous people’s rights to their ancestral resources is something without which no lasting peace can be instituted in the uplands of Asia, which are the sites of various uprisings.

 

 

In India, an important measure that promises to accept adivasi property rights over the natural resources they manage, and on which they depend, is the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act or PESA, as it is popularly called. Even the partial measures of PESA have barely been implemented, and so far it remains only a promise of adivasi self-rule (Pradip Prabhu, 2004).

Reports indicate that the Government of India is considering allocating areas of forest land to corporations to undertake investments that could come in under the Clean Development Mechanism and other similar international instruments. This would only result in further displacing of indigenous peoples. Instead, what the indigenous peoples should demand, and all democratic-minded persons should support, is that the indigenous peoples be allowed to carry out the needed forest restoration or development for the above purposes. Such a proposal has been made by Poffenberger et al (2003) in a study based on Adilabad, Andhra Pradesh.

In the village of Powerguda in the above district, a diesel substitute, pongamia oil, is being produced and used to power electricity generation. This technology was developed by the Indian Institute of Science (IIS), Bangalore. It is being managed locally by the women’s self-help groups (SHGs), who have even sold the carbon saved. Though this is a small step, it shows what can be achieved. Such measures need to be built upon to enable indigenous peoples’ livelihoods to be linked to improved forest condition.

While promoting such schemes of community management of forests, there has been a tendency to exclude women from the decision-making process. While some JFM rules, e.g. in Himachal Pradesh, stipulate that every adult is a member of the JFM assembly, this is not the case all over. Moving away from the so-called head of household to the equality of adult individuals is a necessary step in democratizing community management. Further, measures such as closing community forests for collection of fuelwood and other such products, disadvantage the poor and women in particular (Madhu Sarin, 2003). These issues need to be addressed again, as attempted in Nepal, first in an IFAD project and now as national policy, by allotting dedicated patches of forest to groups of poor women to manage (Nathan and Shrestha, 2004).

 

 

Such measures of devolution and increased role of markets have been seen to foster individualization/privatization of access to productive resources (Nathan, Kelkar 2003). These are occurring all across indigenous people’s territories in Asia. Carried out in an ad hoc or laissez-faire manner, they disadvantage women and other weak and poor sections of the indigenous peoples. These processes of transition in communal properties need to be studied and regulated based on democratic principles of equality of adult citizens. For example, land could be (i) allotted to each adult member of the community; (ii) the individuals have rights to manage the land and acquire the residual income from such efforts; and (iii) the rights to land only be usufruct, with the individual who wishes to leave the land, say to migrate, being compensated for improvements made, while the land reverts to the village.

 

 

Such an orderly process of allotment of communal land could also make provision of public lands for preservation of locally critical environmental services, like watershed protection, while provision of external environmental services would be through trade/compensation mechanisms.

Indigenous peoples have moved into new modes of economic existence – to maximizing income, rather than meeting a more or less fixed basket of needs. New needs have arisen (modern education, healthcare, entertainment, and so on) and modes of production have changed. Aspirations have also changed and increasingly affect economic behaviour. It is not only that the young do not want to be as their parents were, but the parents too do not want this. As Dipankar Gupta (2003) points out, we cannot any more talk just of needs but must take into account aspirations, which have been substantially changed by globalization.

Women have internalized these changes more than men, perhaps because of their responsibility for household and childcare. New systems of community management are needed to take care of these shifts in a way that links effort with reward. While recognizing the need to make ‘men more responsible’ it is also necessary to empower women, through individualized rights to resources, in order to improve household well-being.

 

 

The indigenous peoples have their own ways of suppressing women, often involving violence. Whether as dain, tonhi, or in some other form there is an ongoing violence against women, as part of the process of establishing or strengthening forms of patriarchy. Opposing such culturally-bound forms of oppression and violence is part of the process of further democratizing indigenous communities themselves.

Changes in production systems, whether horticulture, terracing or small-scale irrigation development, all require investment. Some of this, as in the case of small-scale irrigation, is clearly a matter of public investment. But besides such public goods, even investment on private lands would require a substantial measure of public investment. Given that large sections of the indigenous peoples are below the poverty line, they do not have the needed surplus to finance the investments in developing production. For instance, horticulture development requires using labour, while income would be forthcoming only after a gestation period of a few years. If this labour were not compensated it would be difficult, if not impossible, for such farm households to make the transition to a higher income-earning agriculture.

As repeatedly noted, the indigenous peoples, virtually everywhere, face the problem of being politically marginal in the states to which they belong. Consequently, they do not command the share of national investment resources that more politically important groups do. This consequence of political marginality needs to be balanced by money from international sources.

There are many fundamental issues of property rights, due process of law, even of nomenclature, to be resolved if indigenous peoples are to get a proportional or due share of national and global development.

 

References:

Dipankar Gupta, 2003, ‘Meeting "Felt Aspirations": A New Paradigm of Development’, The Indian Journal of Labour Economics, 46(3), July-September 2003, pp. 381-396, New Delhi, The Indian Society of Labour Economics.

IFAD, 2003, Review of Poverty in Asia and the Pacific, Rome, IFAD.

Ministry of Tribal Affairs, 2004, Draft Policy for Tribals, New Delhi.

Dev Nathan, Govind Kelkar and Yu Xiaogang, 1998, ‘Women as Witches: Struggles to Change Gender Relations’, Economic and Political Weekly, 3 October-6 November.

Dev Nathan and Girija Shrestha, 2004, ‘Crafting an Alternative: Forestry for Livelihoods of the Poor in Nepal’, in Dev Nathan, Govind Kelkar and Pierre Walter (eds.), Asian Indigenous Peoples in Globalization, Sage Publications (in press).

Piush Antony, Harishwar Dayal and Anup K. Karan, 2003, Poverty and Deprivation Among Scheduled Tribes in India, New Delhi, Institute for Human Development.

Mark Poffenberger, Emmanuel D’Silva, N.H. Ravindranath, Urmila Pingle, Indu Murthy and Alex Tuttle, 2002, The Clean Development Mechanism and Village-Based Reforestation. A Case Study from Adilabad District, Andhra Pradesh, India, www. communityforestryinternational.org

Pradeep Prabhu, 2004, PESA: The Promise and Illusion of Tribal Self Governance, paper presented at IFAD-KKSF Workshop on Enabling Tribal and Other Ethnic Minorities to Manage Their Natural Resources, Coimbatore, March 2004.

Madhu Sarin, 2003, Empowerment and Disempowerment of Forest Women in Uttarakhand, India, in Govind Kelkar, Dev Nathan and Pierre Walter (eds), Gender Relations in Forest Societies in Asia: Patriarchy at Odds, New Delhi, Sage Publications.

Willem Van Genugten and Camilio Perez-Bustillo, 2001, The Poverty of Rights: Human Rights and the Eradication of Poverty, London and New York, Zed Press.

 

Footnote:

1. Personal communication, Sanjay Bosu-Mullick.