“Our hunting, our economy and even our festivities were interlinked to iron smelting”: The Asur community’s last custodians of a traditional technique – Jharkhand

Laldeo Asur passes his days basking in the mellow winter sun, his 70-year-old body now too frail for the rigours of village life. But it is not his advancing age he is too concerned about but the advance of modernity on his tribe, the Asurs. Laldeo knows that after him there will be none to … Read more

eBook | Research on tribal communities, their customs, languages and rights facilitated by Indian universities: PhD theses published on Shodhganga (public access)

To focus on PhD theses, make sure you include “shodhganga” in your search About Shodhganga The Shodhganga@INFLIBNET Centre provides a platform for research students to deposit their Ph.D. theses and make it available to the entire scholarly community in open access. The repository has the ability to capture, index, store, disseminate and preserve ETDs submitted by … Read more

Improving Bhil children’s reading skills and comprehension: Report on the use of colourful storybooks in a range of Indian languages besides English – Madhya Pradesh

Tulika’s  storybooks were very well received by the students at Kakrana’s Rani Kajal Jeevan Shala (village school). They enjoyed reading them and even understood the stories. They made a considerable impact on both teachers and students and opened the window to the school for pedagogic exercise. Testing reading competence and the level of understanding The … Read more

“Many tribal peoples have an encyclopaedic knowledge of native animals, plants and herbs”: Ingenious skills of tribal peoples

Click on the image to view the slideshow and read more Many tribal peoples have an encyclopaedic knowledge of native animals, plants and herbs; the Yanomami, for example, use around 500 species of plants on a daily basis. The Yali people of West Papua excel as ecologists, and recognize at least 49 varieties of the … Read more

Tip | Santal history and customs explained by the Daricha Foundation – West Bengal and Jharkhand

The Santals, a proto-Austroloid racial group,  are the largest tribe in West Bengal accounting  for more than 50% of the state`s tribal population. Other than West Bengal, their major concentration is in the states of Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha and Tripura.  In Assam, they are not classified separately as a tribe and their lot is clubbed … Read more