(a) Custodians of natural resources are the tribals, but they are the most deprived. Critically examine how climate change will…

(a) Climate change and the survival of tribal communities

Tribal communities (about 8.6% of India's population, Census 2011) live largely in forests, hills, drylands and islands, which are among the most climate-sensitive landscapes. They are custodians of those landscapes through sacred groves (sarna, devrai), clan taboos, rotational fallows and community forest rules. Yet they are the most deprived in land rights, income, health and political voice. The IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report (2022) identifies Indigenous peoples as highly vulnerable and recognises their knowledge as vital for adaptation.

Likely impacts

• Food and livelihood: erratic monsoons, dry spells and heatwaves hit rainfed crops and shifting cultivation. They also affect minor forest produce: changes in when mahua, sal seed and tendu flower or fruit reduce incomes for the Gond, Baiga and Santal. In the Nallamala forests, Chenchu honey and tuber collection is falling.
• Water: springs are drying in the Himalayan and North-Eastern hills, and groundwater is falling in Central India.
• Pastoralists and highlanders: harsh winters and fodder shortages have killed large numbers of pashmina goats among the Changpa of Ladakh. Van Gujjar and Gaddi seasonal migrations are being disrupted.
• Coasts and islands: sea-level rise, cyclones and the 2004 tsunami have shown how exposed the Nicobarese and other island communities are. Loss of land means loss of culture tied to place.
• Health: heat stress, the spread of malaria to higher altitudes, water-borne disease and worsening malnutrition (already high among ST children) add to the burden.
• Displacement and migration: crop failure pushes distress migration to brick kilns and cities. Climate-related projects can also displace people, such as large hydropower in Arunachal or "green" mining for critical minerals in Jharkhand and Odisha.

Critical examination

• The paradox: communities that emit least bear the most risk, because of historical land alienation, weak tenure (many Forest Rights Act claims are rejected), poverty and exclusion from decision-making.
• Romanticism: calling tribes "natural conservationists" can hide their deprivation and the ecological damage done by outsiders.
• Conservation against people: compensatory afforestation (CAMPA) plantations and carbon-offset projects can enclose commons without consent.
• Policy gaps: state climate action plans under the National Action Plan on Climate Change (2008) rarely consult tribal institutions.

Resilience lies in their own systems: millet and tuber diversity, seed-saving (for example Dongria Kondh and Juang farmers), Apatani water management, and community forest governance under the Forest Rights Act (as in Mendha-Lekha). Securing land and forest rights, involving Gram Sabhas in adaptation planning, and funding locally led adaptation are the keys to their future survival.

(b) Secularism, religiosity, religious fundamentalism and spiritualism

Anthropology studies religion as a cultural system of beliefs and practices, focusing on what it means to believers (the emic view) and what it does in society (the etic view), without judging its truth.

• Religiosity: the degree to which religion shapes a person's or group's beliefs, rituals, identity and everyday conduct. Durkheim saw it as collective effervescence that binds a moral community; Geertz saw religion as a "system of symbols" that makes a worldview seem real. Srinivas's study of the Coorgs (1952) and the Sarna worship of the Munda and Oraon show high religiosity embedded in kinship, land and festivals.
• Secularism: as a political doctrine, the separation of religion from state power. The Indian model is "principled distance" or equal respect for all faiths (Rajeev Bhargava), not strict separation. Anthropologists question the idea: Talal Asad (Formations of the Secular, 2003) showed that the secular is itself a modern construct that defines what counts as "religion". T. N. Madan and Ashis Nandy argued that Western secularism fits poorly with South Asian religious life. Secularisation, the decline of religious influence, is a separate process, and one that has not happened uniformly.
• Religious fundamentalism: a modern reaction to secularisation, pluralism and globalisation. It claims a return to "fundamentals", with literal reading of scripture, sharp boundaries between believers and others, and often political mobilisation (Marty and Appleby's Fundamentalism Project). It is not tradition itself but a selective reinvention of tradition, and it is found in many faiths.
• Spiritualism and spirituality: strictly, spiritualism is belief in communication with spirits of the dead, as in 19th-century séances and in spirit mediumship and shamanism, such as the Munda deonra or Santal ojha. In current usage, "spirituality" means a personal search for meaning and inner experience outside religious institutions ("spiritual but not religious"), such as meditation and new-age movements.

Key differences. Religiosity is about the intensity of belief and practice. Secularism is about the relationship between religion and the state. Fundamentalism is a political and ideological form of religion. Spirituality is individual and experiential. In practice they overlap: a secular state may govern a highly religious society, and fundamentalism and spirituality can both be responses to modernity.

(c) P. K. Bhowmick and the decriminalisation of the Lodha

The Lodha (also called Kheria) are a small forest-dwelling community of the old Midnapore district of West Bengal. They were traditionally gatherers, hunters and forest labourers. The loss of forest rights and land under colonial forest laws left them destitute. In 1916 the colonial government notified them as a "criminal tribe" under the Criminal Tribes Act, which made a whole community suspect from birth, subject to registration, roll-calls and police surveillance.

Probodh Kumar Bhowmick (1926–2003), a student of Nirmal Kumar Bose at Calcutta University, made the Lodha his life's work.

• Research: his doctoral study (1960), published as The Lodhas of West Bengal (1963), showed through detailed fieldwork that Lodha "criminality" arose from poverty, landlessness, loss of forest livelihood and stigma, not from any inherent tendency. It challenged the colonial stereotype that the police and neighbours still acted on.
• Action anthropology: in 1955 he founded the Samaj Sevak Sangha, which grew into the Bidisa ashram in Medinipur and the Institute of Social Research and Applied Anthropology. There Lodha families were settled with land, schooling, vocational training and livelihood support, and lived alongside Santal, Munda and other communities.
• Advocacy: he pressed government to treat the Lodha as a development problem rather than a policing problem. This was after the Criminal Tribes Act was repealed in 1952 and the Lodha became a "denotified tribe". He trained many students and influenced tribal welfare policy in West Bengal. The Lodha are today listed as a PVTG.

Impact and limits. His work helped give Lodha children their first graduates and teachers, and it changed academic and official discourse. However, stigma persisted. The Habitual Offenders Acts replaced the Criminal Tribes Act, and as late as 1998 the death of Budhan Sabar in police custody in Purulia showed the continuing violence against denotified communities. The Renke (2008) and Idate (2017) commissions on denotified tribes carried forward this agenda. Bhowmick's work remains a model of applied anthropology that combines research, service and rights.