Appropriate education for Adivasi children: The Vidyodaya School model at Gudalur – Tamil Nadu

The Viswa Bharati Vidyodaya Trust (VBVT) is a community-based organisation working with the Bettakurumba, Kattunayakan, Mullakurumba, and Paniya Adivasi communities in the Nilgiris since 1995, reimagining education as a path to dignity, identity and possibility. All four communities are recognised by the Government of India as Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTGs), reflecting both the depth … Read more

Adivasis’ world view: A truly sustainable lifestyle – Comment

Adivasi people: proud not primitive | Read the full article >> […] Defining what’s special about India’s adivasi or indigenous people is complicated. People, mostly anthropologists and human rights defenders, who know adivasis and have worked closely with them, also tend to be accused of romanticizing tribal peoples. Yet you can begin to understand what’s special … Read more

Learn more about tribal communities in Tamil Nadu

Ethnomedicine: Discoveries through follow-up research of folk or ethnomedical amounting to 74 per currently in use worldwide – Jharkhand & Kerala

How Adivasis of one Jharkhand village are trying to preserve ethnomedicine With ‘civilisation’ and ‘modernity’ having made inroads into India’s tribal areas, its heritage of traditional tribal systems of medicine is increasingly under threat […] “‘Ethnomedicine’, as defined by George Foster and Barbara Anderson in their 1978 essay Medical Anthropology, is the totality of health, … Read more

“We are nothing without the forest, and the forest is nothing without us”: Kattunayakans in the Nilgiris, one of the last few remaining honey gathering communities of the world – Tamil Nadu

Living in the Nilgiris, the Kattunayakans are one of the last few remaining honey gathering communities of the world. Over many generations they have mastered the skills required to tap honey and they take great pride in their knowledge and expertise. For the tribal community, honey gathering is of social, cultural, economic and spiritual relevance. … Read more