Status of Adivasis / Indigenous Peoples Land Series-2: Orissa

Access to land and land based resources has been a critical issue for the Adivasi communities in forested landscapes of Central India, including Orissa. Though land and land based resources are central to the livelihoods of Adivasis, they have poor acess to land and forests. The loss of private landholdings by Adivasis has been a cause of concern. However, as this paper shows, poor access to land is not only the outcome of land alienation to non-Adivasis, but is also the outcome of land and forest policies followed by the State. The paper identifies some of the main processes which have led to poor access to land for the Adivasis.
 

Kundan Kumar was a PhD Candidate at Michigan State University at the time of writing his paper. He and P R Choudhary, an independent researcher collaborated with the Land and Forest Rights Thematic group in Vasundhara, a non-profit organization based in Bhubaneswar on research and action related to land and forest rights. Soumen Sarangi, Pradeep Mishra and Sricharan Behera worked with Vasundhara’s Land Rights Thematic group. This thematic group has been working on land and forest rights related issues for the last two years.