In Search of a Canopy: Tribal Women's Livelihood in Forest-Based Industries in Rural India

Abstract

"Tribal women known for their deep association with the forests are an economically active lot but nevertheless, they suffer disproportionately more from illiteracy, poverty and social abuse. Moreover many forest belts in India are becoming centres of militancy and civil strife because of improper designing of development programmes. The paper argues that more inclusive development in the present time of competition could come through formal integration of the tribal people with the forest- based economy at large that could give tribal women access to higher income and empowerment without distancing them from their roots. This would also mean reducing the high level of dependence on agriculture. Secondary data collected from a nation wide survey could provide a comparable and representative picture of the socio-economic states of tribal women in India, their formal dependence on the forest economy and the tendencies shown over time. Official data collected by a nationwide household survey, the NSS (1999-2000), are subjected to crosstabulation, logistic modeling and indexing to examine the womens economic integration in the forest-based industries. Tribal women are found to be lagging in most development indicators, their occupations largely agriculture based, their integration with the forest related economic activities at low level and their manufacturing enterprises in need of modernization. Filling up these shortfalls through proper training on business and sustainable forestry on the one hand and sensitization of the markets and negotiation processes of their cause could strengthen the deep tie between forests and tribal women while empowering them. The present research also proposes to analyze the subsequent NSS (2004-05) survey data to trace the movements of the tribal womens development status and their integration to the forest economy in the back drop of the high growth rate taken by the Indian economy."