CURRENT NEWS - January 2009

Income Generation for Irular Tribals

Dalits and Tribals are two socially and economically most marginalized communities living throughout India. The two have many sub groups among them, living in different regions and districts of the country with a variety of nomenclatures and cultural variations. Tribals in the northern districts of Tamil Nadu are called Irulars. These have been living in the hills of Tamil Nadu about two centuries ago, but have been displaced to the plains when tea and coffee plantation came up on the hills. However, the Irulars until today maintain their distinct culture and ethos. They are not Hindus by religion but nature worshippers. But regrettably, a slow co-option is taking place into the pantheistic Hindu religion and its way of worship. The govt. stance that whoever is not a Christian or Muslim is a Hindu adds to this co-opting confusion. This is regrettable, because then they lose their own traditional belief system and get drawn into the Hindu caste system.

The Irulars are not yet used to the local farming works or to formal education. They remain isolated, living at the outskirts of the villages and normally work as bonded labourers in rice mills, brick kilns or stone quarries.

They are close to nature, living in the forest areas, hunting snakes and rats. Now snake hunting and selling its skins is forbidden by law. Yet, they remain the best native doctors for curing snake bites. In 1990, we unionized them and began to educate them on their basic human and livelihood rights. In 2004, we, the Social Action Movement (SAM) helped them to set up a Herbal Garden and Nursery and a Dispensary with native herbal medicines. SAM is also conducting 10 Preparatory Schools for the past fifteen years in order to promote formal education among the tribal children. We have freed a few hundreds of the Irula tribals from being bonded labourers. We have recently initiated a major project at Arpakkam village near Kanchipuram town, to set free hundreds of bonded tribal families doing slave work in 40 stone quarries there.

Economic self sufficiency is their major need and so we have had many schemes in the past for generating income to these poor families. Recently, we had an opportunity to promote one more such project with assistance from our government, namely Cooperative Sheep Rearing.

Cooperative Sheep Rearing for Tribals

The Irulars, being a very simple people by nature are able to take up only very simple income-generation projects. Knowing this, the Tamil Nadu State Government's Department for Tribal Welfare came up with a plan to promote sheep rearing co-operatives among them. Govt. selected SAM as the only NGO to implement this programme in Kanchipuram district.

The govt. supported 128 tribal families with 16 units of sheep in 7 hamlets namely Sirupinayur, Kilakkadi, Palur, Abiramapuram, Kidankarai, Kurumpirai and Kallankollai. One unit is 10 well-grown sheep. The govt. share was Rs 9000 for one unit and SAM contributed Rs 3000 more for each unit to make it more viable and SAM also paid grazing and maintenance costs. We also arranged for training the tribals in the care of the animals and their productive usage. We insured all the sheep as the govt. required it and was also good for the tribal beneficiaries. A total of Rs 185,000. has been spent on this project.

Each sheep will yield a ram annually and the annual benefit for each family works out to be Rs 2400. This is a small amount but quite a good sum for the poor tribal families. We hope this additional income will be spent on the tribal children's health and education and thus be invested in their future.