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India's adivasi, or tribal, communities have most often been depicted as homogeneous and egalitarian, at least compared to the entrenched social hierarchies that characterise rural caste society. This article draws on fieldwork in a mining-affected adivasi village in Jharkhand, eastern India, to consider how compensatory public sector employment for mining-induced land dispossession has contributed to new processes of stratification within adivasi society. On the one hand, compensatory employment allowed those who attained it to pursue increasingly common middle-class aspirations, and a considerable degree of class mobility. But on the other hand, it fostered new, enhanced forms of intra-adivasi differentiation – not only in terms of income but also consumption and lifestyle, education and children's life chances, and household and gender dynamics. New internal disparities, in turn, have acted to erode pre-existing elements of adivasi society that revolve around values of egalitarianism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bir bano? disum ale horoko kale sukua, said the Mundas to Hoffman when he was writing his Encyclopaedia Mundarica in the last quarter of the 19th century. 'We the Mundas do not like to live in a country where there are no forests', is not just a casual statement of some nature lovers. The statement had a deep social and spiritual connotation. Hoffman noted that when somebody dies the Mundas avoid saying that so and so has died, but they would say so and so has been lost in the forest (birjanae instead of goejane). Forests are the dwelling place of the deceased ones. When the village is settled by clearing forests, a patch of the virgin forest is kept untouched with the belief that it is the abode of the mother earth (jaer era) or 'lady of the sacred grove' and other spirits. This 'sacred grove' or sarna or Jaer (Jaher of the Santals) is the only place of propitiation of the benevolent spirits of all the indigenous peoples of Jharkhand. The forest has a great relevance in life of the Mundas, who think it is associated with their souls and ancestor-hood. In this paper I had tried to explore the relation of forest with its Management in the life of this tribal people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governments are absent from empirical studies of civil violence, except as static sources of grievance. The influence that government policy accommodations and threats of repression have on internal violence is difficult to verify without a means to identify potential militancy that did not happen. I use a within-country research design to address this problem. During India's reorganization as a linguistic federation, every language group could have sought a state. I show that representation in the ruling party conditioned the likelihood of a violent statehood movement. Prostatehood groups that were politically advantaged over the interests opposed to them were peacefully accommodated. Statehood movements similar in political importance to their opponents used violence. Very politically disadvantaged groups refrained from mobilization, anticipating repression. These results call into question the search for a monotonic relationship between grievances and violence and the omission of domestic politics from prominent theories of civil conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims at examining the childcare practices and issues experienced by the low-income construction workers in India. It is concerned with understanding varied aspects relating to problems that construction workers, as parents, face while bringing up their children in one of the small construction companies of eastern India, in the state of Jharkhand. Qualitative methods have been used in order to collect the data based upon phenomenological principles. Ethnography and photo-elicitation were used as a primary method of data collection. Apart from this, in-depth interviews were also conducted with the workers of the construction company. Discussion with the participants led to the emergence of four themes: children left alone; playing at risky site areas; poor health of children; and children working along with parents. The research findings indicate that infants are taken by their parents to their place of work whereas children between five and 10 years had to be left alone at home. It was also found that acute poverty was a major cause leading to the consumption of inadequate and low nutritional food, leading to poor health of the children. Based on the study findings, there is an imperative that societal forerunners and philanthropists continue to use research findings to understand the childcare practices amongst the low-income workers and draft strategies accordingly, to improve the situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Oraon and the Sarak are two distinct ethnic groups with respect to their own religion, culture, language, and food habits, and they live in similar environmental conditions in Ranchi District in Jharkhand, India. Age differences in anthropometric and body composition measurements and nutritional status of adult (≥18 years) female Oraons (N = 216) and Sarak (N = 110) were recorded and compared. The subjects were categorized into three age groups: < 39 years, 40-59 years, and ≤ 60 years. The women in both samples were observed to be suffering from a very high degree of chronic energy deficiency (CED; body mass index [BMI] < 18.5 kg/m2 in Oraons = 62.50% and in Saraks = 46.36%). Very low proportions of body fat mass (FM) and high percentage of fat-free mass (FFM) were recorded in these two adult samples. Linear regression analyses revealed that age had a significant impact on all variables and the level of undernutrition and thinness increased with age. Oraon women had lower BMI, higher rates of undernutrition, and lower percent body fat (PBF) and FM compared to the Sarak women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes tribal politics, finance and the state in Jharkhand, India. The recent history of state and tribal financial relations has not been a happy one and it has failed to live up to promises made in the official ideology of tribal development. These relations have clearly improved since Independence, but also the gap widened between tribal Plan promise and performance. This is an important distinction. Along with distinctions between relative and absolute improvements, and between the terminology of commentators and the actions of governments. It was observed that there has been a strong measure of administrative continuity before and after 1950. The main changes in administrative structure have been of content and not of form. This conclusion holds true, positive discrimination notwithstanding; indeed, largely because of its ineffectiveness. It is also suggested that post-Independence tribal policies have been better supported financially than their pre-Independence counterparts. However, this contrast should be read more as a condemnation of the mean efforts of the colonialists than as confirmation of the generosity of post-colonial subventions. It is also concluded that the picture of state/tribal financial relations is repeated within Bihar. In Bihar the gap between the rhetoric and reality of plan performance is quite marked and is underscored by the balance of political forces within the State.