Return their patch of green

In whose hands shall our forests be protected? In whose hands but the Adivasis8217;. They have intimate knowledge about the forests, they a...

In whose hands shall our forests be protected? In whose hands but the Adivasis8217;. They have intimate knowledge about the forests, they are organically linked to the forests and they are the historical custodians of our forests. But our conservation laws don8217;t reflect this. We treat our indigenous people, the world8217;s largest, as a defeated people.

In February, Kerala Chief Minister A.K. Antony8217;s police fought them as if they were an enemy army. Even children were not spared at Wyanad. A repeat of the Nagpur massacre of 1998.

We beat them in the name of conservation, when we don8217;t deceive them in the name of development. We never tire of demonising them. Our ancient scriptures treated them as the Other, labelling them Nishada, Rakhasa, Dasyu, etc. Just as the West called others savages, barbarians, cannibals. But the Adivasis, our Elder Brothers, display infinite levels of tolerance.

We owe to the Adivasis whatever forest cover is left in the country today. The commercial felling, mining, road building, plantations, hydel projects, irrigation dams and similar ventures have decimated the forest cover, much against national policies and even laws. While profits have flowed to the coffers of the urban, upper caste elites, the Adivasis, uprooted and impoverished, have nurtured and prayed for the patches of forests they have been pushed into.

The Adivasis, as a general rule, use the forests just enough for their survival. Like bees collecting nectar from flowers. They respect the seasons, the scarcities and abundance in nature and the patterns of animal population dynamics. They don8217;t hunt a carrying doe, they don8217;t trap a breeding fowl, they don8217;t uproot a medicinal herb, and when they farm they use the principles of what we call ecology albeit in areas that have remained out of reach of the green revolution.

Many Adivasis herbalists can identify more plant species than any of our university trained plant taxonomists can do off-handedly. A couple of years ago when a team of us university educated conservationists met with a group practicing herbal medicine in the tribal heartland of Attapady, Kerala, they drained the last bits of pride we had through their amazing knowledge of plants and phenology.

What was even more amazing was that the 8220;primitive8221; languages the three tribes spoke had original and often single-word names to describe over 200 plant species. The Malayalam that A.K. Antony and I speak does not have such a repertoire of environmental vocabulary. Nor does the Hindi spoken by Delhi8217;s netas and conservation babus.

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In 1981 near the Kodaikanal hills, I saw an Adivasi elder throwing Salim Ali, the father of India8217;s conservation movement, into excitement by his accurate description of the food a breeding flycatcher was feeding its nestlings.

An Adivasi is organically linked to the forests in ways that we cannot easily comprehend. In contrast, the forest staff the government recruits struggle on a daily basis to find a posting outside the forests.

Handing back our forests to the Adivasis for their sustainable management is the most logical and pragmatic solution to protect what is left of our forests. This can also help increase the size of direct revenue from forests produce as well as substantially reduce the huge government expenditure for forest management.

Once it has been agreed as a policy, and followed by legislative reforms, there are multiple ways of operationalising this by using locally appropriate institutional systems 8212; ranging from the hamlet associations to the government-sponsored tribal joint forest management committees.

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The countless forests education and training centres should be geared to train Advasis to take essential lessons in management and to inventory and analyse their invaluable traditional knowledge.

This is a challenge no state can take but Kerala. This is a graceful way for Antony to repent. It is a critical decision that cannot be taken without political consensus. The Opposition cannot venture to resist it, now that they have identified with the Advasis8217; struggle. This is not an altruistic decision but a pragmatic one. The British had planned to introduce this in Bihar, but gave up due to bureaucratic pressure. And this is an opportunity for Kerala to give the country yet another remarkable model to follow.