Elephants & tigers: Recurring motifs and issues for India’s tribal communities

“The tribals I was told about are elephant people. As far back as any one can remember, they have taken care of elephants. They understand elephants as no one else does. They grow up with elephants, and the elephants with them.” – Edward Rice in Mother India’s Children >>

Some tribal communities inhabit regions where wild animals abound. Where conservation measures have helped to restore elephant and tiger populations, as in the Western Ghats, this has met with international acclaim. Yet shrinking habitats have also led to an unprecedented increase in the number of man-animal encounters, not seldom with lethal consequences:

Adivasi elders tell us that they walked among the elephants without fear 50 years ago. Those days are long gone. Read more >>

For a perspective on these issues, see Tiger conservation and tourism – its impact on the people in and around the tiger reserves >>

“What we are telling to the outer world is that no conservation would be possible without cooperation of the local community [and] integrating their traditional wisdom with modern-day scientific approach.” – WWF’s Kerala consultant KH Amitha Bachan | Learn more: Biodiversity | Climate change | Ethnobotany & ethnomedicine | Nature and wildlife | Sacred grove | United Nations on climate change >> >>

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Search tips: in the search field seen below, combine the name of any particular state, language or region with that of any tribal (Adivasi) community; add keywords of special interest (health, nutrition endangered language, illegal mining, sacred grove); learn about the rights of Scheduled Tribes such as the Forest Rights Act (FRA); and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, women’s rights, and children’s right to education; specify any other issue or news item you want to learn more about (biodiversity, bonded labour and human trafficking, climate change, ecology, economic development, ethnobotany, ethnomedicine, global warming, Himalayan tribe, hunter-gatherers in a particular region or state, prevention of rural poverty, water access).

For a list of websites included in a single search, click here. To search Indian periodicals, magazines, web portals and other sources safely, click here. To find an Indian PhD thesis on a particular tribal community, region and related issues, click here >>

“Together, we must endeavour to strengthen tribal communities which are the role model in preservation of water, forest and land, and learn from their connection with nature and the surrounding environment for the sake of the entire human race.” – journalist and tribal rights activist Dayamani Barla in The Wire >>