case study on tribal development

Rural Livelihood and Women: Glimpses from an Indian Tribal Village

• First Online: 01 January 2022

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• Purva Yadav 5 ,
• Shreya Akarshna 5 &
• Anuradha Shankar 6  

Part of the book series: Sustainable Development Goals Series ((SDGS))

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In the twenty-first century, livelihoods will be needed by perhaps two or three times the present human population, and it is therefore necessary to understand the changing dynamics of it. A livelihood comprises people, their capabilities, and their means of living. Livelihood is environmentally sustainable when it maintains or develops the local and global assets on which means of livelihood depend. The livelihood framework is also applicable in the context of rural areas. This covers capital both natural and social. Indian villages (both tribal and non-tribal) are unique in their own way, and very intriguing if you try to understand it from the emerging interrelationship between resource and livelihood from the women perspective. This chapter draws on insights from a small tribal village called Audali located in Sitarganj Tehsil of Udham Singh Nagar district in Uttarakhand. Tharu tribe, who has migrated from the state of Rajasthan centuries back to this area, dominates Audali village. It is interesting to see how development process has transformed their means of livelihood and how role of women became paramount at the household and community level with the changing socio-economic profile of the household and the village. The study throws light on the experiences of the group of motivated Tharu women in a more informal and fluid personal-cum-work space, such as home-based small-scale activities like handicraft, and capture the shifts and continuum in social relations, particularly in the context of means of livelihood and gendered division of work.

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Uttarakhand became the 27th state of the Republic of India on 9th November 2000. To secure greater economic and political autonomy, the state was created from the state of Uttar Pradesh (U.P.) and is in the northwestern part of U.P. Udham Singh Nagar did not exist as a separate administrative entity until the year 1995. The seven tehsils or Development Blocks of Udham Singh Nagar, namely, Khatima, Bajpur, Kashipur, Gadarpur, Rudrapur, Jaspur, and Sitarganj had been part of Nainital district for more than 100 years (Robinson 2001 ).

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Acknowledgements

We are thankful to Mrs. Sunita and other Tharuwomen of Audali village for being the inspiration behind this work. Further we would like to extend our gratitude to Prof. Deepak Mishra and Prof. Sachidanand Sinha from the Centre for the Study of Regional Development (CSRD), Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) for their useful comments and suggestions. We would also like to thank Professor Baleshwar Thakur from Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, for his consistent encouragement and helpful comments on the chapter. Last but not the least, we would like to acknowledge Ms. Sudeshna Mitra from CSRD, JNU, for preparing the map of the study area.

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Centre for the Study of Regional Development, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India

Purva Yadav & Shreya Akarshna

Department of Geography, Shyama Prasad Mukherji College, University of Delhi, New Delhi, India

Anuradha Shankar

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Correspondence to Purva Yadav .

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Department of Geography, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, New Delhi, Delhi, India

Baleshwar Thakur

Department of Geosciences, Missouri State University, West Plains, MO, USA

Rajiv R. Thakur

Resources Analysis Division, National Centre for Earth Science Studies, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India

Srikumar Chattopadhyay

Department of Geography, Dyal Singh College, University of Delhi, New Delhi, Delhi, India

Rajesh K. Abhay

Annexure 1: An overview of the occupational structure of Udham Singh Nagar and Sitarganj

Figures 21.4a–d and 21.5a–d present a brief snapshot of the occupational structure of the Udham Singh Nagar and Sitarganj. Figure 4a reveals that the share of rural population to total population is higher than the urban for Udham Singh Nagar and Sitarganj. The figure presents a comparative picture of the workforce profile. Figure 4b shows that the percent share of non-workers is greater as compared to the total workforce in both district and tehsil. The gender composition indicates that at both the spatial units, females predominantly constitute the non-worker category with about 80%. Similarly, Figure 4d reveals the gendered division of main and marginal workers. It is quite clear that the females participate mainly as marginal workers in the labor market than as main workers. This is in line with the stereotypical pattern of the gender composition of the workforce at various spatial scales.

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Yadav, P., Akarshna, S., Shankar, A. (2021). Rural Livelihood and Women: Glimpses from an Indian Tribal Village. In: Thakur, B., Thakur, R.R., Chattopadhyay, S., Abhay, R.K. (eds) Resource Management, Sustainable Development and Governance. Sustainable Development Goals Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85839-1_21

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Political Economy of Tribal Development: A Case Study of Andhra Pradesh

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