Recasting Citizenship for Development - File UPI

18 SUMI KRISHNA
imagination (Robb 1997: xvi), [was] reflected among other things in the
measuring and classification of waste, forest and cultivable areas into distinct
geographical spaces. As with other colonised regions during this
period, this increasing rigidity was extended into the gradual hardening
of boundaries between the tenurial strata. (Misra 2005)
The political attempt to settle various groups into sedentary occupations
at particular locations and exclude them from other occupations and areas
effectively reduced the range of livelihood choices available to these hitherto
mobile groups. The control and appropriation of common property
resources, such as land, water and forests by the state in pre-Independence
India has now been well-documented. This process has continued, even
intensified, affecting all poor communities that depend on land and other
natural resources (see Sagari R. Ramdas and Nitya S. Ghotge, Chapter 2,
this volume).
Especially vulnerable are the tribal groups of central and southern
India, whose subsistence depends on foraging for edible plants and
animals from the wild (P. Thamizoli and P. Ignatius Prabhakar, Chapter 4,
this volume). Also at risk are people who practice ‘nomadic transhumance’—moving
seasonally along with their livestock across large distances
following the grazing, often living in temporary shelters throughout
the year, such as the Deccani herders. So, too, are people like the genderegalitarian
Bhotias of the Kumaon Himalayas (Hoon 1996), who practice
‘fixed transhumance’—moving seasonally with their livestock from the
lower valleys, where they have permanent winter homes, to higher pastures
in summer. Many other adivasi/tribal groups in peninsular and northeastern
India also lead precarious lives as shifting (or swidden) cultivators.
In this form of cultivation, the cropped area is ‘shifted’ after a few seasons
by leaving cultivated fields fallow for natural regeneration and moving
on to other fields, which are then prepared by slashing and burning the
vegetation; in turn, a previously cultivated field would be cleared and
replanted in cyclical rotation. Forest dwellers, who depend on gathering
non-timber forest produce, are also threatened by arbitrary state
regulations on land-use (Neera M. Singh, Chapter 3, this volume).
Among those most in jeopardy are migrants/immigrants in precarious
ecological niches, such as the women-headed households on the riverine
lands of eastern India (Gopa Samanta and Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt,
Chapter 5, this volume). Also at risk are the migrants and others in dry