Opinion On Tribes and Trees

After Indira Gandhi was assassinated,a file,one of the last ones she signed,was sent to me. It wanted the Andaman and Nicobar Islands to be studied. If something bothers you,I am the fall guy. The nit with his feet on his Ahmedabadi soil but willing to ride the stars with you. After we recovered from the shock of losing our PM,I started reading about the islands. We had a young scientist in an institute in Kerala who had worked on the Jarawas,the Sentinelese and the Onges,some tribes we knew and others no man had met,at least socially. At the level of the technology at which they lived,he worked out the land per person they needed to survive. It was always more than an acre. We are now talking of deeply wooded forests with forty percent plus crown cover. The answer one of our top industrial houses,working there and producing a mass market consumer good produced with an efficient MNC technology,gave was to improve their technological base. This would release the forest this group wanted and they were willing to pay and work for it.

There is always someone to spoil the party. Some of the tribes did not want to be developed. In fact,one of them had a nasty habit of shooting poisoned arrows at people who tried to be friendly with them. Years later I was to watch with great happiness a social anthropologist,a Sikh gentleman,establish the first contact with them,which was great news on our only TV channel then,called Door Darshan. This tribe needed more than two acres of land per person to survive and there were so few of them left that there was no other way. So our MNC friends had to wait as also some very enthusiastic developers who had dreamt that the islands would become Singapore.

The World Bank-sponsored Bradford Morse Commission on Sardar Sarovar has ravaged Nehru in the first sentence on their chapter on Tribals. But actually his correspondence with Verrier Elwin shows great sensitivity to these kinds of problems. He realised that India’s Adivasis have to develop and was keen that they should,but at a pace they would determine. Development literature and anthropology has gone much ahead since then,but the human face remains.

There is,as Mihir Shah reminds us in his very interesting Malcolm Adisheshiah Lecture,the real uncertainty of determining the potential of natural resources for future generations. Mihir is a member of the Planning Commission now but a few years ago he worked on a Working Group on Dryland Development I chaired and the chapter he wrote on learnings is the only real advance I have seen on this vexed problem in recent years. We need trees and money can be made from them. Mihir is contemptuous of those who would keep technology and markets away and yet he thoughtfully brings in the need for a strategic vision in myriad ways (read the report in http://www.planning commission.nic.in). We need to ponder,for honestly,this land belongs to you and me,even after Jairam moves away to another Ministry.