Livelihoods and development: Socioeconomic exclusion in Mumbai’s Hinterland

Abstract

In Maharashtra, as in India more widely today, tribal communities are located at the intersection of a traditional forest-based way of life and the competing needs of the agents of development and modernization that make alternative claims to ancestral land and water. The study focuses on so-called tribal, scheduled, and other backward class communities living around the Tansa Lake and Wildlife Sanctuary and documents their ongoing struggle over land and water in the face of the expansion of urban Mumbai. On account of their socioeconomic vulnerability, tribals are increasingly forced to reduce their reliance on agricultural activities and the forest, with which they have been associated for generations, and to become wage laborers. Tribals, in this view of the world, are simply jungle rats, a threat to the twin (and all-too-contradictory) forces that drive contemporary Maharashtrian politics: the ever-present “march of the modern and the urban,” in the sense of economic transformation, development, and expansion of Mumbai, and the rise of the violently antimodern Maratha-Hindu political movements. It is also suggested that the discourses of conservation and protection marginalize tribals without achieving the desired objective of protecting important ecological resources.