Tribes are the conservators of forests – National seminar on International Day of World’s Indigenous People in Mysore

Deccan Herald, Sunday 8 April 2012 – Mysore
Illegal mining in forests is destroying the life and culture of schedule tribes, opined Dr H Sudarshan, director of Vivekananda Girijana Kalyana Kendra.
He was speaking at national seminar on ‘Tribes and Analogous People in India: Contemporary Issues’ on the occasion ofInternational Day of World’s Indigenous People. The seminar was jointly organised by Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Manav Sangrahalaya (IGRMS) and Anthropological Survey of India (AnSI).
Certain people are looting the natural resources in forests. However, with this daylight robbery continuing unabated, scheduled tribes who are the conservators of forests are leaving for urban areas.
He also said that scheduled tribes have their own unique art and culture. But atrocities are being committed against them, and there are no constitutional provisions for their protection, he observed.
Dr Sudarshan observed that access to primary health care centres is very difficult for tribes. There have been no genuine attempts to integrate modern medicine with traditional medicine, he remarked. He stressed on the need for increasing the number of health centres in tribal areas. […]
Explaining the plight of tribes due to the naxal menace, he said that Scheduled Tribes are caught in between the police and naxals. He said that utmost commitment is needed to solve the problem.
Commending the Chief Minister’s initiative in providing ownership of land to tribes, he said that a programme is organised at the end of this month to distribute the title deeds for the beneficiaries. […]

Source: ‘Mining destroying tribal culture’
Address : http://www.deccanherald.com/content/87432/mining-destroying-tribal-culture.html
Date Visited: Sun Apr 08 2012 11:34:28 GMT+0200 (CEST)

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“The forest was never far away from habitation. For instance, excavations of the settlements at Atranjikhera and Hastinapur, which are not too far from Delhi, have yielded evidence of a large variety of forest trees. The Buddhist Canon states that aside from the village and its outskirts, the rest of the land is jungle. Travelling from one town to another meant going through a forest. Therefore, when in exile, the forest was not a physically distant place, although distant in concept.“ – Romila Thapar (Emeritus Professor of History, Jawaharlal Nehru University) in “Forest dwellers in early India – myths and ecology in historical perspective” | Learn more >>

A Supreme Court judgment projects the historical thesis that India is largely a country of old immigrants and that pre-Dravidian aborigines, ancestors of the present Adivasis, rather than Dravidians, were the original inhabitants of India. – Comment “India, largely a country of immigrants” Photo © The Hindu >>