Native advocacy

We arrive in Pattavayal after a three-hour drive from Udhagamandalam (Ooty), the route lined by areca nut plantations, tea estates, eucalyptus trees and the odd patch of undisturbed shola forests. A little away from this nondescript check-post town between Kerala and Tamil Nadu is the tiny hamlet of Thenembad, home to 28 Betta Kurumbar families for millennia.

One of the Primitive Tribal Groups (PTGs) of the Nilgiris, the nomadic Betta Kurumbar number around 6,000 today and are present across the Nilgiris region.

As the forests around them turn into gigantic plantations and double-storey bungalows, they themselves seem stuck in time, living in their tiny mud houses clustered around a communal shack that doubles as their temple.

We’re here to meet 32-year-old Sobha Madhan. Dressed in a purple salwar-kameez, she stands out among the other women, all of whom are attired in a sari-and-blouse worn in the traditional Betta Kurumbar style.

After we’ve been seated in her veranda and served tea and biscuits by her mother, Bommi, she says, “I didn’t think I’ll become like this and all. Till standard X, I studied right here at the Ambalamoola government higher secondary school.”

Madhan heads the Adivasi Youth Forum (AYF), a collective she set up in 2016 to serve as a voice for the indigenous people of the Nilgiris. She is a rare adivasi woman in this region who is vociferous about her people’s dire situation. She articulates her ideas and demands in fluent Tamil, Malayalam and English, enabling her to reach out to a wide cross-section of people.

Being Betta Kurumbar

“Both my parents are small-scale farmers and coolie workers,” says Madhan. “They kept encouraging us to study and I really have to thank them for that. Being adivasi, it’s tough for us to compete with the rest of society, but my parents inspire me.”

Though indigenous to the Nilgiris, nomadic communities such as the Betta Kurumbar have little or no landholdings. The lack of access to education, healthcare and other essential services has pushed most adivasis to the brink of deprivation.

The younger generation has no means to aspire for a better life and livelihood. “The conservation groups care a lot about the wildlife and little about the adivasis. Even those NGOs that claim to work for the people end up making the indigenous communities habituated to welfare, and don’t enable any real development for our people,” Madhan says. With a master’s degree in social work, she has worked with several leading NGOs and conservation organisations in the Nilgiris, and is more than familiar with their ways.

“If the NGOs are doing good work as they claim, then how come even after so many decades the majority of the community is still in an abysmal condition, plagued by alcoholism and poverty?” she asks. That set her on the quest for an alternative.

Learning from the world

In 2011, Madhan joined the India team of La via Campesina (LVC), an international farmers’ organisation with members from over 140 countries. This opened doors to a whole new world for her. “I got to travel to various parts of the world, witnessing farmers’ movements and indigenous people’s struggles first-hand,” she says. “I met indigenous people in Brazil, Thailand and Turkey who were completely independent. Some adivasi leaders I met in Brazil had fought for many years before they got their land back. That’s when I thought I, too, should do this kind of work in the Nilgiris.”

It was when she was working with the idea of reclaiming adivasi land that Madhan came to know of the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers Act, or the Forest Rights Act (FRA), in short. Enacted on December 18, 2006, the FRA is the culmination of decades of agitation by adivasis and tribal rights groups. The objective is to correct “historical injustices” committed against the country’s forest-dependent communities.

It offers forest-dwellers the option to apply for three kinds of land and governance rights — namely, the Individual Forest Rights (IFR), Community Rights (CR) and rights over Community Forest Resources (CFR). The law has the potential to redistribute more than 40 million hectares of forest land, or more than half the land under the forest department. However, its implementation across the country has been poor, and even zero in a few states such as Tamil Nadu.

Madhan says, “I’m now working strongly to use the FRA effectively, because that’s the only thing we have to get our land back. Our communities have lost many of our ways of living and traditions. This is what we are trying to revive. I believe it’s only with empowerment and self-respect that this will happen.” She then adds meaningfully, “All of this has to come from within our adivasi community. It shouldn’t be imposed from outside. That will never last.”

Sibi Arasu is an independent journalist based in the Nilgiris