Description

The Zilla Budakattu Girijana Abhivruddhi Sangha (hereafter called "Sangha", literally District Indigenous forest-dwelling peoples’ welfare organisation in Kannada, the local language) is a community-based organisation of the indigenous Soliga tribal people. The Soliga people numbering a few tens of thousands (around 60,000) are living in and around forests of southern India (southern Karnataka and Tamil Nadu). They were earlier semi-nomadic and after various restrictions from forest laws, they have faced decades of disenfranchisement. Over the last decade, the Sangha has taken up the the advocacy and activism around securing their forest rights and land rights. Their struggle culminated with the tribe being among the first to receive these rights under a new legislation passed by the Indian government (the Forest Rights Act). More recently, the Sangha has diversified its struggle to include better education and health for forest-dwelling tribal communities through participation in action research with public health researchers on improving maternal health access for Soliga tribal mothers.

They have taken up several innovative steps to ensure wider benefit to the Soliga community. Two recent ones that are inspirational are (1) their efforts to work with a variety of stakeholders to ensure local benefit to wild honey-gatherers; earlier most of the revenues from sale of wild honey gathered by them from thick forets used to acrrue to middlemen. OVer the last decade, the Sangha has worked with social enterprises to ensure maximum benefit to a collective of gatherers rather than exploitative middlemen. They are now trying something similar with coffee as well, and (2) they have worked closely with public health researchers in a unique participatory action research programme (supported by the WHO Alliance for Health Policy & Systems Reserach, Geneva) and implemented by Institute of Public Health Bangalore. Under this program, they conducted a detailed participatory assessment of barriers to heatlhcare seeking among their community through meetings at each settlement and created a district-level community dialogue and designed an intervention that led to the training of young tribal youth as "health navigators". After a succesful pilot, the state government is planning to expand this idea of establishing indigenous health navigators in other disticts with indigenous populations.

Their long-term struggles have mainly focused on securing forest rights. Reversing decades of social injustice towards tribal communities, the Indian government passed the Forest Rights Act in 2005. The Act required restoring of rights over land and conservation rights to forest-dwelling tribal communities across the country. However, local implementation of this was a challenge as many tribal communities were totally unaware of how to do this. The Sangha took the lead in workign with the district administration and the Forest department in ensuring recognition of land rights of the forest-dwelling tribal communities in the district. Today, all the tribals in the district have received documents related to their land thanks to the Sanga’s work. This has received recognition in local and national press as a pioneer effort by a grassroots tribal movement. The rights allow them to not only extract resources sustainably (for their livelihoods), but also the rights and responsibility to conserve natural resources. The Sangha works closely with scientists and researchers to monitor the extraction of non-timber forest produce to ensure that its extraction is sustainable. They also work closely to ensure equitable distribution of the benefits accruing through such extraction through tribal co-operatives.