https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/india-indigenous-peo...
“Is it possible to go back to our village in the forest?” asked Arjun Murmu, a Santhal Adivasi, sitting outside his pucca home in Manada village, oblivious to the laughter of his grandchildren playing nearby. Even nine years after relocating to Manada, home for Arjun is still Kabatghai, a village in the core area of the Similipal Tiger Reserve (STR) in Mayurbhanj district. It isn’t outside the reserve in Manada (seven kilometres from the Jashipur block headquarters), where his family had to move along with 46 other Santhal families in 2016. For over three decades, the STR authorities have relocated Adivasis from the reserve’s core area to create an inviolate zone of 845.7 square kilometres to protect tigers. This zone – notified as the Similipal National Park on April 24 this year – has the state’s highest concentration of tigers. According to the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972, a national park must not have any human habitation or activities such as grazing, farming and forest resource extraction.
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These relocations – ostensibly voluntary – changed the lives of Adivasis in the core area irrevocably. They lost their farmlands, had reduced access to forest resources, and many became daily-wagers. This has served as a warning to other villages inside the reserve, which have started getting organised in order to resist relocation from their ancestral forest homes.
..A 2018 study published in the peer-reviewed journal Land Use Policy has also documented the impact of relocation on the livelihoods of tribal households in the reserve. It used primary data from 40 households that were relocated outside the reserve and compared it with data from 61 households that were not relocated and lived inside the reserve. The study found that the average share of income from agriculture, livestock and non-timber forest products was relatively higher for households living in the core area. Conversely, income from non-agricultural wage labour contributed the most to total income for those who were relocated outside the core area.
