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Who is Adivasi?

We have been organizaing friendship tours to meet with the forest people living in Godavari Basin.Andhra Pradesh,South India. The forest people are called “Adivasi”(indigenous　peples in one of the Sanskrit language) and known as nativepeople of India. They are called “Scheduled tribes”in the Indian constitution,and account for 8.2% of the total Indian population.

The people belonging to “Scheduled tribes” live in various places of India,mainly inthe hilly terrains and mountainous areas away from fertile plains.This is why theyare called “Girigans”(forest people).They have made their living by hunting and gathering and migrating agriculture,and have developed their own cultures that well coexist with nature. Most of their lives and cultures,including beautiful songs and dances,the festival of the earth,palm wine called “Taddi”,traditional herbal knowledge,have been born from the harmonious relations with the forest.

A report of the Exposure trip 2006

We never forget that our affluent water and rich electri power would have been Brought by sinking Adhivasi people into the bottom of the Poravaram dam.

By Akira Kusuhara

The southern India was in the midst of dry season. Under the hot weather at over forty degrees centigrade, I wondered how the Adivasis laround the Godavari river were doing. How were the NGOs’ activists such as Sneha, Kuruthi, Maitli, Prakuruthi, who are working hard day and night under the fierce heat in order to protect Adivasis’ right as such and also as human beings, doing?

Never before this trip (March 20 - 30, 2006), have I felt as mine the sorrow, indignation and anxiety of the “people of forests”, more than 100 thousand Adviasis living in the 323 villages. Their villages have been forgotten and abandoned by people in the world, and are expected to sink in the reservoir of a big dam (the Polavaram Dam).

The tiny village where I was allowed to stay this time is called Kothuru in the P.R.Puram mandal where the Konda-Reddy are living. The village, which consists of six households including fifteen people, is situated on a rocky slope of a small hill and commands a fine view over Godavari River. The villagers have made living by drinking its water, washing themselves with it, overlooking it day and night, feeling the cool breeze from it, growing cattle with its water, irrigating their fields with water from it to cultivate beans and millets (Jawar,Green gram,red gram,Makkajana,Bapparetc.),catching fish in it, hunting wild animals and collecting honey and fruit in the back forests.

The elderly couple who accepted me in their home gave me their vine-woven bed, and were sleeping side by side on a sheet spread over the rock overlooking the Godavari River. Waking up at midnight for the lavatory, I found them sleeping with the lullaby from the glittering Godavari stream under the innumerable stars in the sky. I was struck by their divinity and couldn’t move for some time.

Why do these people have to be driven out from their home, separated from their Godavari River and forests, forced to disperse and expelled to strange places? They said to me, “how can we bring our tamarindo trees if the dam comes?”

The Adivasis, who have been living by communal ownership and collective use of their forests and land, have no landing patent that certifies their personal land and property ownership. This means that they might not be qualified to receive R&R (the government compensation) for the forced relocation.

One of the elders from a nearby village said, “We are illiterate. … How can we make living anywhere else?” An NGO worker is afraid that, after spending all of the compensation money, the villagers will flow into cities to survive, only to grow slums.

To be continued…