India's Forgotten Faces

You're comment puzzles, and highlights India's tragic love affair with modernization. Denying India's poverty problem isn't the way to solve it.

My guess is this community does want to enter into the 'mainstream' of Indian society... the question is how - what is the best way to include people who the Indian government (and you) calls 'backward'? If they could become mainstream they would. But the power structure, and the sheer number of people in India, stands as an insurmountable obstacle. My guess is that the folks in this community hardly have any power at all... their lives are almost completely controlled by their corrupt panchayat (local gov) leaders, who determine everything in their lives, from food rations to electricity to education.

In my experience, Adivasi Indians are clearly marginalized more than other segments of our society. The government didn't even know that many of these folks existed... they weren't even on the census, and they probably didn't have any government documents. You write that everyone is equal under Indian law... but not everyone is equal under our culture. In my experience, the 50 year-old law rooted in the Western philosophy isn't as powerful as an ancient Hindu culture refined through 1000's of years.

It's not wrong to want National Parks, especially if international donors like the World Bank demand them. I love parks, and environmental conservation is clearly necessary in India. But India is using environmentalism in the race toward economic development as an excuse to 'modernize' it's populations, and in the process is loosing thousands of years of history and culture. India must understand that kicking indigenous people off their ancestral land without having a holistic plan for how to integrate them into broader society will cause more problems than it will fix.

Here's a constructive opinion implied by the authors that you didn't seem to pick up on: Instead of building a solar powered fence and walking away, the government could have included a training program and tools so the community could fix the fence themselves. Teach a man to fish...

In closing, your words belay a prejudice that I have experienced many times in India: You use the word 'backward' to describe Adivasi people. This is a common term of derision. Adivasis may be equal under the law, but you clearly see them as less advanced than yourself. Maybe you even see them as holding India back... because, you know, India is right on the verge of becoming an 'advanced' society. In fact, once India modernizes and enters into the mainstream, some people in the Western world might stop referring to it as a 'backward' country. /snark

Every country has it's problems... it's best to face them honestly.