Recasting Citizenship for Development - File UPI

58 SAGARI R. RAMDAS AND NITYA S. GHOTGE
Yet again, the statement only reaffirms and echoes the concepts, perspectives
and attitudes of the colonial state and the subsequent post-colonial
perceptions of the Indian state.
It is clear that for the women shifting cultivators and pastoralists, their
struggle is far from over. It is not only a struggle for legal rights to resources,
but also for recognition and acceptance of a livelihood strategy that has
for so long been viewed as ecologically destructive and ‘inefficient’. These
women, who have been the target of the violence carried out by the forest
bureaucracy, are clearly demanding a recognition of their rights, a way of
livelihood, and for a just and fair access to resources. We must acknowledge
that the survival of the forest landscape and that of the forest/forestdependent
communities is mutually interdependent.
It is time that we critically analyse, unravel and address current development
efforts within the context of people’s livelihoods and natural
resource use. These efforts are being unconditionally supported and
extolled as unique and path-breaking examples of involving women
and addressing gender issues but are effectively marginalising the larger
questions of women’s rights to resources and control over resources.
Women will continue to organise and voice their demands for livelihood
rights as part of a long continuum that stretches back over 200 years.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We thank Madhusudhan, who is working with the Adivasi Peoples Movements
in Andhra Pradesh, for his invaluable insights and inputs on the struggle of podu
farmers and the larger struggle of adivasis for their rights to livelihood resources.
We have drawn upon our work with ANTHRA and its database on medicinal
and fodder plants. The database programme was designed by ANTHRA using
Oracle software, to manage information documented by ANTHRA between 1996
and 1999 in an action-research project ‘Documentation of Ethno-veterinary
Practices’. (The database is maintained at ANTHRA-Hyderabad, A-21 Sainikpuri,
Secunderabad–500094, Andhra Pradesh, India.)
NOTES
1. In 1987, the Ministry of Energy, Forest, Environment, Science and Technology,
Government of Andhra Pradesh, issued a memo (Memo No. 26531/For I/87-1,